January Fonts

Pattern Filled Text

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ImageMagick Editor Update

An update to the ImageMagick editor is released. The IM editor provides a way to modify FiG effects or develop your own. Command line instructions are sent directly from the editor to ImageMagick with results immediately visible on-screen.

Latest changes include updates to many of the effects, a brief explanation of each special effect and ways it can be altered in the editor, and a pop-up list of the macro keywords that can be used to reference colors, font, font size, etc.

When the editor is visible, all special effect toolbar commands are loaded into the editor before execution. This allows you to make changes to the commands sent to ImageMagick. In addition, the IM editor holds a list of library effects. These are effects that have limited use or limitations such that they dont deserve space on the toolbar. If the editor is closed, toolbar effects are executed immediately.

Font Clipping Work-around

Some of the decorative fonts available on FIG achieve their effect with wild settings of font metrics to jam characters close together or add ornate flourish and ligature. This can cause an issue with ImageMagick, the graphics engine that runs FIG, where parts of the text are clipped off. The canvas seems to be trimmed too close. In the top example above, the flourish at the leading edge of the character was clipped.

To resolve the issue, set the text alignment control found on the control panel to align the text to the opposite side of where the clipping problem appears. The default alignment is top-left and is what created the top example in the image.

By setting the alignment to top-right, the problem was eliminated yielding the lower example from the image above.

The Freehand Draw Tool

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Color a Dingbat with Freehand Draw

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Want Fonts?

I've received several requests for new fonts to be added. Thanks. The additions are in progress. I'm happy to add most fonts as long as I can confirm they're licensed for free use. If you see a font or dingbat that you want on FIG, please post a link to it in the comments.

My favorite place for downloading fonts is dafont.com

Freehand Draw - Released

The freehand draw feature described a few days ago is now available. I'll be posting a video tutorial for it shortly.The opacity allows a highlighter effect when merged "over" the image or .

You can use the merge "under" control with a transparent image like a dingbat to produce important works such as the one below:

Some innovative enhancements for this tool are in the works and can hopefully added later

December Fonts

Is there a font or dingbat you'd like to see on FIG? Send me a link and I'll install it.

New Fonts Added

Added some new fonts today...




(Marquis De Sade is labeled "DeSade" in FIG)

Also, a nice matching set of dingbats for DeSade can be found on the dingmapper in the "Flourishes" folder.

Freehand Draw - Preview site

An upcoming release of Font Image Generator will provide a freehand draw tool that can be used to draw or annotate onto images that you generate.

Here is a link to the preview site

To use the feature, generate an image and then click the draw button and draw with mouse or graphics tablet if you have one.

To merge the drawing with the original image, click the "create" button. If you want to apply the drawing under the original image click the "over/under" button just right of the create button to toggle the target of the merge.

It uses a Flash overlay which generates a .SVG vector image which is then composed into the underlying image by ImageMagick.

Release is delayed by a bug in ImageMagick which should be fixed in the next ImageMagick release due soon.

The bug is that ImageMagick fails to recognize unfilled paths and always fills them with black. You will see this on any curved line that you draw. This makes the feature pretty useless in FIG. It works well with straight lines, stipples, etc., however.

In 2009, expect a full suite of vector graphics tools that can be used with FIG generated images.

Please give the alpha site a try and post your comments and observations.

New FIG text Engine, Stroke Settings, Image Dims.

All FIG images are now created with ImageMagick giving new features and more robust performance, especially with larger font sizes. Previously, text generation was done by PHP/GD.

The new features include stroke color/width and the ability to set an image width independent of the height. Word-wrap also behaves much better with this change. Stroke settings are found on the control panel. To achieve transparent fill with strokeoutline, clear the hex value from the fill color box.

Now, setting the image width by itself controls the point where text wraps to the next line. Image height expands automatically to contain the text that was entered.

Setting both width and height does the same thing except that any text that overflows the dimensions you set will be clipped.

Arc Distortion Effect

A interesting new effect is available in the IM editor effect library. Arc distortion lets you bend text or any image into an arc.



Command: -rotate 0 -virtual-pixel Background - background \#ffffff -distort Arc '120 0'

The background color in the command is the color IM uses to fill the empty space created when the effect is applied. 120 is the number of degrees in the ARC. Set it to 360 and text is bent into a full circle.




Command: -rotate 0 -virtual-pixel Transparent -distort Arc '120 0'

Starts with a transparent image. In this case, the empty space is filled with transparent pixels



Command: -rotate 180 -virtual-pixel Transparent -distort Arc '120 180'

To reverse the arc apply some rotation applied: