bdf2gdfont.pl - Convert X11 "BDF" fonts into a loadable font format for GD.
% bdf2gdfont.pl courR12.bdf > courR12.fnt
This script converts BDF-style X11 font files into a format that can be loaded by the GD module using the GD::Font->load() method. There are a number of ways to obtain BDF fonts.
Some BDF fonts can be found in the standard X11R6 distribution. This script will automatically uncompress gzipped font files if their extension ends with .gz (the gunzip program must be on your path).
The "fstobdf" utility, a standard X11 utility, will read a named font from the font server of your choice and return it in BDF format. You can pipe it to bdf2gdfont.pl:
fstobdf -s fontserverhost:7100 -fn 8x16 | bdf2gdfont.pl > newfont.fnt
Use xlsfonts to find out what fonts are available. Most fonts will have long names like -B&H-LucidaTypewriter-Bold-R-Normal-Sans-18-180-75-75-M-110-ISO8859-10.
Some fonts are only available in PCF (compiled) format. To obtain these, you can either turn on a font server and follow recipe (2), or use TAGA Nayuta's pcf2bdf utility. This utility is available from http://www.tsg.ne.jp/GANA/S/pcf2bdf/ (page is in Japanese, but you can find the download link).
This font converter only works with fixed-width fonts. If used with a TrueType or proportional font it will die with an error message.
GD
Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org>, heavily adapted from bdftogd from Jan Pazdziora <adelton@fi.muni.cz>.
Copyright (c) 2004 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
To install GD, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm GD
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install GD
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.