Graphtext is a Flatpress plugin to create images showing text.
This is very useful for displaying text with special characters that may not be available in all browsers and all devices. An image will appear the same everywhere. Without Graphtext, you have to type your text in an editor, make a screenshot, crop the image, save it, upload it, refer to it in your text, and there’s another file to consume hard drive space and time when making a backup or moving your blog. With Graphtext, you can simply type a tag and forget about everything else. On the other hand, of course, it takes some server time to create the image each time the page is loaded.
To install Graphtext, download it from here, unzip it and upload it to your blog, in a folder called fp-plugins/graphtext. Then choose the fonts you need and upload them in fp-plugins/graphtext/font. Go to Flatpress Control Panel, Plugins, and enable Graphtext. Now you’re ready.
Graphtext gives you a new tag: GT.
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Why big yellow letters on a blue background? Because this was the style used before. To change the look of your text, use attributes for the tag:
font=font name to change the font (a file name from the font folder, without the ending .ttf)
ink=ink color to change the color of the letters (six hexadecimal digits in the format rrggbb)
paper=paper color to change the color of the background
size=size to change the size of the letters (in points)
height=height to change the height of the containing rectangle (in points; use a number greater than size
up=pixels to move the letters up in the rectangle
down=pixels to move the letters down in the rectangle
Default values are:
font=times (needs times.ttf to be present)
size=24 (24 points)
ink=ffffff (white letters)
paper=000000 (black background)
height=40 (40 points high)
up=0 and down=0 (letters not moved)
Specify any attribute to change them and omit any of them to leave unchanged. For example, if now I type , I will get text, but in the same font and color, since I left them unchanged. And in a big box, since I left height unchanged, too.
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Here you can see why should height be greater than size. Now they’re both 12, but this crops descenders. You can try moving your text up: → but you can’t display both descenders and accented uppercase letters. So rather increase height instead.
Graphtext doesn’t know everything and even won’t until a PHP bug is fixed. For example, these Devanagari consonant clusters are created with the Chandas font that’s capable to display correct ligatures, but PHP can’t handle them.
These are the same ligatures typed with the same font in a text editor and cropped from a screenshot – just like the way I described before:
So if you need text written the second way, Graphtext cannot help yet.