Chinese text GIF file generation

[hungjunglu at yahoo.com]

--- In python-list at y..., William Park <parkw at b...> wrote:
> They are using blocks of image in 
>     <map> <area...> <area...> ...  </map>.
> So, what is your question?  Do you simply want to duplicate it using
> Python?  Or, do you want to display each character as separate 
image?

Character-by-charater would not be efficient, since this implies 
downloading thousands of files to view just one single webpage. 
Usually people do it by chunks. A chunk is typically a few 
paragraphs. A small article can fit into one single chunk.

> Once these images are stored in /icons/chinese/, you would have to 
write
> stand-alone script to match your input characters to corresponding
> images.  It would spit out <img src=...> for each chinese 
character.  

Usually people would use an application server like Zope to serve 
this kind of requests. LaTeX is good for printed documents, but not 
for webpages utilities.

By the way, I just found that that they revived the IFCSS website: 
http://www.ifcss.org/ (There were some internal political problems 
for sometime, and the website was dead for a long time.) They have 
text-to-bmp, text-to-PostScript converters, but they are kind of old. 
I bet their fonts are missing quite a few Chinese characters, too. 
It's just sad how politics has so deeply ruined this website.

I'll search around a bit more. If I don't find anything good, then 
I'll use Java, or if I have time, I'll write one myself. :) Might 
have to play with font format and with PIL a bit.

regards,

Hung Jung