buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (11/27/90)
I have a specific text formatting problem and would appreciate some advice. I would like to make lots of labels for many sizes of 3-ring binders, hanging files, etc. These labels would consist of a thin (maybe dotted) rule as a bounding box with text inside. I would like to be able to enter the snippet of text and have the program automatically scale the font and/or break the lines to fill the available space. Since I have maybe 100 labels, I would rather enter a simple text file that consisted of the strings and out pops the formated labels, ready to be printed on some heavier card stock and cut out for use. I know I could do this all by hand with various drawing programs, but I am looking for something with a bit of intelligence. Does anyone know of any program that does this type of font scaling and line breaking automatically? Thanks alot! -- A. Lester Buck buck@siswat.lonestar.org ...!uhnix1!lobster!siswat!buck
lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) (11/30/90)
buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) writes: >I would like to make lots of labels for many sizes of 3-ring binders, hanging >files, etc. [...] a thin (maybe dotted) rule >as a bounding box with text inside. I would like to be able to enter >the snippet of text and have the program automatically scale the font >and/or break the lines to fill the available space. Well, tbl (a troff preprocessor) will do something similar -- it'll move text around to fit a box, and make sure that the box is the right size, but it won't alter the text size. Actually it can look quite imprtessive to have a whole shelf of binders with identically-formatted titles. At my last job I had a shelf with titles like "4.1 BSD Vol 2A", "Electronic Mail", "Manual Pages", "Networking" and "Child Pornography". Another approach is to write a PostScript procedure to fit text, perhaps using the blue-book line-breaking algorithm, but I'd much rather do this in troff! Lee -- Liam R. E. Quin, lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (12/05/90)
In article <578@siswat.UUCP> buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) writes: >I would like to make lots of labels for many sizes of 3-ring binders, hanging >files, etc. These labels would consist of a thin (maybe dotted) rule >as a bounding box with text inside. I would like to be able to enter >the snippet of text and have the program automatically scale the font >and/or break the lines to fill the available space. Since I have >maybe 100 labels, I would rather enter a simple text file that consisted >of the strings and out pops the formated labels, ready to be printed >on some heavier card stock and cut out for use. I know I could >do this all by hand with various drawing programs, but I am looking >for something with a bit of intelligence. >Does anyone know of any program that does this type of font scaling >and line breaking automatically? I just posted a program (nametag.pl) to comp.lang.perl and alt.sources that will generate nametags in postscript from a simple list. It doesn't break lines but it will rescale the font to fit if the first choice is too large. It consists of a perl program that calculates the positioning for each line, but the scaling is done in postscript. Changing a few constants in the program might make it do what you need. Les Mikesell les@chinet.chi.il.us