Hello everyone, 

Our fantastic Art Director came to our company a little while ago with some
amazing pixel pushing skills and aesthetic sense. He also brought with him
his collection of thousands of fonts all saved in carefully grouped
directories of the different styles and mood they posses. To keep himself,
as well as others that use his fonts straight, he methodically created a
Font Book, a sampling of all his fonts printed out on an 11" by 17" pieces
of heavy paper. 

This is all good and well until he lost it.

This is also a problem when we receive new fonts. I have some curiosity of
creating a Perl Script that will drill down his carefully laid out font
directory and create either Gif (or png it seems) images of all his fonts to
connect to a webpage, or, a Postscript document that categorizes the fonts
available. The idea is to output the fonts using the font face and gather as
much information available about the font to use to describe the font.

I thought I could make a Perl Script to do this, and run it via a cron job
every week or so, so they documentation on our fonts would always be fresh.

Most of this seems cut and dry until I think of how I'm going to output
images or postscript info using the Font Face itself. I know there are
Modules that do this, but I've personally have only played a bit using
really ugly Unix Fonts, I do have the 'Programming Web Graphics With Perl &
GNU Software. Does anyone have advice on modules/ways to read Mac-Compatible
Fonts? 

I know there must be programs that do this, or similar, but I'd like to take
a whack at it myself and get my feet wet in programming in Perl for the Mac.
I think this would be a great project and really helpful for others if I GPL
it. Since I myself am an aspiring artist/designer, I also have some personal
interest in this. 

At my disposal is one G4 with Perl 5.6, I do have the GIMP installed, and
will install ImageMagick if needed, as well as anything else, baring
compilation problems (grumble, grumble) wonder if GD is installed on OSX?.

Thought I'd get some wisdom before I commit a long night to these fumblings,

Justin Simoni 
http://skazat.com 


 

 





 

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