ppmlabel

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

You can add any number of separate labels in a single invocation of ppmlabel, limited only by any restrictions your environment has on the number and size of program arguments (e.g. a shell's command size limit).

If you don't specify ppmfile, ppmdraw reads its input PPM image from Standard Input.

The output image goes to Standard Output.

A more sophisticated way to add a label to an image is to use pbmtext or pbmtextps to create an image of the text, then pamcomp to overlay it onto the base image.  

OPTIONS

The arguments on the ppmlabel command line are not options in the strict sense; they are commands which control the placement and appearance of the text being added to the input pixmap. They are executed left to right, and any number of arguments may appear.

You can abbreviate any "option" to its shortest unique prefix.

-angle angle

This option sets the angle of the baseline of subsequent text. angle is an integral number of degrees, measured counterclockwise from the row axis of the image.

-background { transparent | color }

If the argument is transparent, ppmlabel draws the text over the existing pixels in the pixmap. If you specify a color (see the -color option below for information on how to specify colors), ppmlabel generates background rectangles enclosing subsequent text, and those rectangles are filled with that color.

-color color

This option sets the color for subsequent text.

Specify the color (color) as described for the argument of the ppm_parsecolor() library routine.

-colour is an acceptable alternate spelling.

-file filename

This option causes ppmlabel to read lines of text from the file named filename and draw it on successive lines.

-size textsize

This option sets the height of the tallest characters above the baseline to textsize pixels.

-text text_string

This option causes ppmlabel to draw the specified text string. It advances the location for subsequent text by 1.75 times the current textsize, which allows drawing multiple lines of text in a reasonable manner without specifying the position of each line.

Note that if you invoke ppmlabel via a shell command and your text string contains spaces, you'll have to quote it so the shell treats the whole string as a single token. E.g.

  $ ppmlabel -text "this is my text" baseimage.ppm >annotatedimage.ppm

-x column

This option sets the pixel column at which subsequent text will be left justified. Depending on the shape of the first character, the actual text may begin a few pixels to the right of this point.

-y row

This option sets the pixel row which will form the baseline of subsequent text. Characters with descenders, such as "y," will extend below this line.

LIMITATIONS

Text strings are restricted to 7 bit ASCII. The text font used by ppmdraw doesn't include definitions for 8 bit ISO 8859/1 characters.

When drawing multiple lines of text with a non-transparent background, it should probably fill the space between the lines with the background color. This is tricky to get right when the text is rotated to a non-orthogonal angle.  

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, without any conditions or restrictions. This software is provided ``as is'' without express or implied warranty.

Table Of Contents

• NAME
• SYNOPSIS
• DESCRIPTION
• OPTIONS
• LIMITATIONS
• SEE ALSO
• AUTHOR