Talk: New program (or next Figlet version 3.0)

In article <32gthl$ab...@gagme.wwa.com> bob...@wwa.com (Bob Allison) writes:
>Denis Moskowitz  <den...@muddcs.cs.hmc.edu> wrote:
>>Well, not just that one effect.  A program could probably be made that would
>>take any "background" text and apply a simple blocky design to it, as a mask.
>>so:
>>
>>1234        ###           123
>>3456  plus  #  #  equals  3  6
>>5678        #  #          5  8
>>7890        ###           789
>>
>>to take a useless example.  Then you take a screen-wide gradient like the
>>one used above, apply a blocky font to it (which could be figlet) and tada!
>>If I was going to write it (which I probably won't get around to) I'd use
>>Perl, but I'm just a Perl junkie.  Anyone with more time up for it?
>
>
>   How about if the next version of Figlet could accept Figlet fonts AND 
>Figlet patterns.
>
>   This way if a pattern (.flp) were specified (figlet -f roman -p fade), 
>you would get the shape of roman, but with a fade effect.
>
>   And while we're at it, how about being able to specify a backgroud 
>(.flb) for the letters (figlet -f roman -p fade -b dots).
>
>   How about it Glenn, Ian?  What do you think?  This kind of thing would 
>allow for a lot of variations by mixing font shapes, patterns, and 
>backgrounds.

Well, first of all, the "next" version of figlet is already out. :-) I'll
post an announcement on here in just a bit. In any case, some of the
effects you're talking about could be done with a script of some sort
that called figlet. The "vertical" patterns, in which what a character
becomes depends only on which column it is in, should not be much trouble.

However, the "horizontal" patterns would be tricky, since the script would
have to know where a figlet output line starts and stops. Ahhh, but if
the script knows what font is being used, it could look at the first
line of the font file and find out how high the font is. Then it would
know where lines start and stop.

Even easier would be to tell the script how high a line is explicitly.
In fact, the script wouldn't even have to call figlet. The script could
just replace a character it reads with the appropriate character in a
given pattern. Then just pipe figlet output through the script. This is
starting to sound very easy to write ....

Regarding the backgrounds, that's something I've been thinking about for
a while, too. Putting characters on a background would have all kinds of
applications. For example, it would make it quite easy to mix figlet
output with ASCII pictures. But don't expect this to be added to figlet
any time really soon.

				Glenn Chappell   <><
				e-mail: gg...@uiuc.edu

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