Chinese text GIF file generation

[hungjunglu at yahoo.com]

--- In python-list at y..., William Park <parkw at b...> wrote: 
> Because there is so many variables (ie. font, style, size, ...), I 
don't
> think there is package that does what you want.  However, you can 
use
> LaTeX to produce Postscript format, and then convert it into GIF.

There surely are existing packages. Just visit any of the Chinese 
news portals (e.g: www.sinanet.com) and you'll see what I mean. 
Unlike Korean or Japanese, or even Vietnamese, for Chinese websites, 
it is usually a better idea to present text in GIF than in multi-byte 
encoding schemes. The thing is, there is a big need out there for 
real-time or quasi-real-time on-the-fly GIF generation of Chinese 
text in GIF format. Anything that involves an intermediate manual 
process is unacceptable. (Besides, it's easy to do it manually on any 
PC: screen capture + format conversion and you are done. It's just 
time-consuming.) For websites containing multiple foreign languages 
in the USA, text-to-gif converters is a real necessity: you don't 
want to show jibberish to your visitors.

Writing these packages in Java is a bit involved, but not that hard. 

I am pretty sure that the C library has been written, since someone 
else has mentioned it to me a long time ago. Imagine the number of 
Chinese computer geeks out there: it is unthinkable that this thing 
has not been done. (Of course there might be legal issues with GIF, 
but PNG will be fine.)

Hung Jung