Synopsis

If you have successfully aplied this patch and reinstalled GD, you can call string with parameters containing ISO-Latin-2 characters and they will be correctly displayed in the gifs.

Description

This is a patch that replaces standard ASCII-only fonts in libgd, used by GD module, by those with full 256 char Latin2 support. In order to put new fonts into the library, the source has to be changed and the library recompiled. That's why you need to have untarred GD library ready before aplying this patch.

Installation

This is my attempt to make the patch easily installable. However, it may fail on your configuration, but do not worry -- you can patch the GD/gdlib yourself, see below.

Unpack this distribution next to unpacked GD distribution. Then run

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

You will be prompted for a directory containing the untarred GD distribution. Then the files containing the fonts are replaced with those with ISO-8859-2. Also, libgd.c and gd.h files are patched to make them 8-bit clean. And, the fifth test output gif (that contains some texts) is also replaced, so that the tests run OK.

You can of course do all this by hand: the fonts are in the fonts directory, you should copy them into the libgd directory in GD distribution, in Un*x using command like

cp fonts/* ../GD-1.16/libgd

assuming you are chdir'd in the GD-Latin2 directory and the GD distribution is unpacked next to it (in ../GD-1.16).

Then apply the patches in file libgd.c.diff to libgd.c and that in gd.h.diff to gd.h file in GD distribution. The Un*x command using the program patch would be like

patch -d ..GD-1.16/libgd < libgd.c.diff 
patch -d ..GD-1.16/libgd < gd.h.diff    

You can of course change the relevant files by hand, change the lines in the diff files marked by !.

Other charsets

In this package, I have also included my little script bdftogd that creates gd font definitions from those in bdf file format. So you can run your favorite ISO-8859-1 or so fonts through it and make use of them.

Bugs

You have to reinstal this patch whenever you upgrade your GD package.

The small font has changed from 6x12 to 6x13 in ISO-8859-2 version.

The bdftogd convertor is really a simple hack that suits my needs. You are welcome to find problems and send me patches to make it more general.

Changes

0.54

Fixed bug in bdftogd, causing wide characters to be broken.

0.53

Bug with "Up" characters fixed, spotted by Michal Brandejs. This resulted in a change in function prototype in libgd.c and also in gd.h, because eight bit characters cannot be treated as signed. We need to have them either as ints or as unsigned chars.

0.51

Better font found for 5x8, also the Giant font generated.

0.5

First release, put on CPAN; Lincoln Stein responds by saying he wants to apply the patch directly into the GD package.

Version

0.53

Author

Jan Pazdziora, jpx (dash) perl (at) adelton (dot) com

http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/

at Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic