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Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 16:41:29 +1100
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Subject: Re: Idea for underlining in GD text functions
From: ttoohey@toowards.com (Tim Toohey)

Ron Korving wrote:

> Shouldn't you better discuss this with the gd people over at boutell.com?
> 
> Ron

Yes, perhaps I should. I take it that your point is that this kind of
feature belongs in the underlying library rather than in PHP. PHP's gd
extension is a wrapper around the libgd library to make it usable to PHP
scripts, rather than a place to extend the features of libgd.

Alas for the ImagePSText() function I don't think the gd people will be much
help as it uses the t1lib library. While I might have some chance at
getting the gd people's ear, I'm not sure I'll have much luck with t1lib
(is there an active open development of t1lib?)

So, given the above, and at the risk of being off-topic now, is the general
approach I'm proposing, embedded control character sequences, a reasonable
way to achieve the goal (underlining). Another approach that I had
considered was a kind of HTML rendering mode, which really is simply
another way of have embedded instructions in the string. This, to me, seems
beyond the scope of a low-level graphics library like gd (or t1lib).
Perhaps what is needed is a new library that sits between PHP and gd/t1lib
to do these kind of higher-level text rendering jobs? Maybe that already
exists and I just haven't come across it.

Thanks,
Tim