Text formatting text-formatting

Image Serving provides several alternatives to render text, accessible with the text= and textPs= commands.

textPs= provides a high level of similarity with text rendered with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. text= is reasonably compatible with text rendered with Windows Wordpad.

NOTE
In addition to the differences listed elsewhere, text= produces subtle differences in the rendered text when compared with textPs=. For example, underlines do not have the same thickness and position and synthesized italics are rendered at a slightly different angle. If text does not fit into the available space, text= may partially crop the last line, while textPs= only renders complete lines.

All text commands accept formatted text based on a subset of the RTF (Rich Text Format) specification. Each text layer may specify a different text command.

The following table lists the key features available for each text command:

Feature
text=
textPs=
See also
Adobe Photoshop-compatible
no
limited
Flow text into arbitrary shapes
no
yes
textFlowPath=, textFlowXPath=
Flow text along arbitrary paths
no
yes
textPath=
Copy-fitting
no
yes

Copy-Fitting

,

\copyfit

,

\copyfitlines

,

\copyfitmaxlines
Text box margins
no
yes
\margl

,

\margr

,

\margt

,

\margb
Full paragraph justification
no
yes
\qj
last line justification
no
yes
\lastql, \lastqr, \lastqc, \lastqj
Paragraph indentation
no
yes
\fi, \li, \ri
All caps and small caps text
no
yes
\caps, \scaps
Image Serving colors
no
yes
\*\iscolortbl
Multiple anti-aliasing modes
no
yes
textAttr=
top-bottom/right-left text flow
no
yes
\stextFlow
Photofont® support
no
yes
Font Handling
Auto-size layer to fit text
yes
yes
text=, textId=, size=
CMYK support
yes
yes
\cmykcolortbl, \*\iscolortbl
Right-to-left character flow
yes
no
\rtlch
Disable word-wrap
yes
no
textAttr=
Auto-scale text to fit layer (by varying resolution)
yes
no
textAttr=

RTF-compliant strings can be assembled manually or by formatting the desired text in a text editor or word processor capable of saving RTF files. The RTF file may then be opened in a plain text editor, and the relevant raw RTF content of the file copied to the request URL.

Some word processors generate rather large files, which include substantial preambles that are not used by Dynamic Media Image Serving. It is recommended to remove the unused RTF elements from the string before passing the string to the text commands.

Language-encoding based on UTF-8 and ISO standards is supported in RTF strings as an alternative to the standard RTF character encoding mechanisms. This allows applications to send non-English text to the server without knowledge of RTF encoding.

All non-HTTP compliant characters must be properly escaped, if the string is to be transmitted by way of http. Only ‘=’, ‘&’, and ‘%’ need to be escaped if the string is incorporated into the catalog::Modifiers field of an image catalog record. Control characters, including <CR>, <LF>, and <TAB> should always be removed.

The Image Serving text engines interpret a sub-set of commands defined by the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification, version 1.6. This sub-set is focused on font/character formatting, simple paragraph formatting, and support for international fonts and character sets. More advanced formatting constructs, such as style sheets and tables, are not supported at this time.

Familiarity with the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification, as published by Microsoft, is required when attempting to construct RTF-encoded text strings manually.

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