A SIDE NOTE: Months ago the janitor was asking for pheedbak regarding people's impressions of the different fonts and orientations. One person offered some very interesting words reproduced here for any who might find them similarly useful:
No opinion on the font. Regarding the other variables, namely viewpoint position and light source, I much favor a position like that of example 6. Specifically, the words should be slightly-to-somewhat BELOW the viewer, and they should lead away from LOWER LEFT toward the UPPER RIGHT CENTER. (This is basic stagecraft, see any book on graphic design or set design.)The nonverbal messages of this are (a) you the viewer are bigger/in a position of power, (b) there is interesting/good stuff in the direction you are now headed.
Other messages are not as good, for example #1 and #2 both say, this stuff is bigger/taller/stronger than you are. #2 & #9 say, the interesting stuff is behind you in the opposite direction to yours. #13 and #7 both say SGI is unstable and falling over.
follows are the 13 entries generated back on 10/6/94.
The sequence of commands employed to create the /toolbox/www/images/ncsbB5.gif "developer toolbox" extruded beveled 3D characters are as follows:
from this subsystem, a series of outline fonts are loaded into /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base which we use in the next step.
fromtype1 /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base/NewCenturySchlbk-Bold ncsbB.mf 0.0
bevelstring ncsbB.mf strncsbB.sgo "developer toolbox"
bevelstring created the font object using the NewCenturySchlbk-Bold turned into ncsbB.mf font description and the "developer toolbox" text string, and saving the sgi object out to strncsbB.sgo;
spintext strncsbB.sgo
spin, a virtual sphere or object rotation interface, can be used to interactively manipulate a string object into an oblique position. spintext was a one-line-modified-executable version of spin.c wherein, line 157,
cpack(0x000000);
cpack(0x00FF00);
snapshot
is an interactive front end to haeberli/imgtools/scrsave,
an image capture program. once spin properly obliqu-i-sized
the "developer toolbox" string, snapshot was used to carve out
just the correct one-to-one sized image to go into the html document page.
NOTE: a BIGGE bumm occurs when using the background color for a transparency color in togif if one uses imgtools/izoom to change the size of the RGB image prior to running togif. In this bum-o-reeno, a "foggy" edge distortion artifact occurs where text and background meet. Thus the necessity of creating the RGB image with snapshot at precisely the size one wishes to use in the HTML document page.
togif ncsbB.rgb ncsbB.gif -x 0 255 0
This is the new togif Paul "mr. totally insane(tm)" Haeberli worked up and makes available to anyone out on Grafica Obscura with it and all the other mostools executables resident in the sgi.com ftp site:
usage: togif image.rgb image.gif [-n ncolors] [-m colormap.map] [-g gammawarp] [-t ditthresh] [-x transR transG transB] [-u]
the -n option specifies how many colors to use
the -m option allows you provide a colormap file to use
the -g option will lighen or darken the image before conversion
the -t option prevents dithering of constant colors,
use values between 0 and 255
the -u forces un-interleaved output
Local copies of all
these tools also exist on the Toolbox.
Copyright © 1995, Silicon Graphics, Inc.