Little Captions On The Hillside...

The font I've used in my banner, and on the mee.nu and mu.nu sites, is called Horatio.  Unlike the 300-odd fonts I've arranged for use in the banner generator, it's not free; it's owned and licensed by Linotype.  (I think...  Yep.)  I got it with some program or other years ago, possibly Lotus Word Pro, and I've been using it ever since.

But while I have a license, and can do whatever I like with it here at my desk, I can't put it on a server.  So those little words in the menu?  Static images.

I currently have 669 words in my list, including upper/lower case variations and plurals.  That's about 2MB of PNGs per colour.  I can run them through ImageMagick and get a slightly smaller file, but I can't seem to get an 8-bit PNG with working alpha transparency from any programmatic solution, so I'm stuck with 32-bits.  They do have run-length compression, so they're not that bulky.

So, 2MB of black text, 2MB of white text, and anyone who needs more words can just let me know and I'll rerun the program.

But if you need a different colour...  Well, okay.  I just updated the program to cycle through all 140 of the named web colours.  That makes 280MB of PNGs in about 100,000 files.

It takes about two minutes to generate a complete set for one colour - about five hours in total.*

I hope you're happy!


* Why so slow?  Well, there's a slight bug in the graphics library I'm using, and it can't keep the baseline of text even at small font sizes.  So I'm doing what amounts to 4xFSAA on the fly in Python.  Also, it's anti-aliased, composited, shadowed, defringed and all that good stuff.  And I'm running on a four-year-old Athlon XP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 307 words, total size 2 kb.