gifecho - generate a GIF from ASCII text

Author

       Gershon Elber.

GIFLIB                                             2 May 2012                                         GIFECHO(1)

Description

       A program to generate GIF images out of regular text. Text can be one line or multi-line, and is
       converted using 8 by 8 fixed font.

       This program reads stdin if no text is provided on the command line (-t), and will dump the created GIF
       file to stdout.

Name

       gifecho - generate a GIF from ASCII text

Notes

       There is a hardcoded limit of 100 the number of lines.

Options

-v
Verbose mode (show progress). Enables printout of running scan lines.

-s colormap-size
Explicitly defines the size of the color map of the resulting gif image. Usually the image will be
bicolor with fg as color 1, unless [-f] is explicitly given in case the color map size will be big
enough to hold it. However it is sometimes convenient to set the color map size to certain size while
the fg color is small mainly so this image may be merged with another (images must match color map
size).

-f foreground
Select foreground index (background is always 0). By default it is one and therefore the image result
is bicolored. if FG is set to n then color map will be created with 2^k entries where 2^k > n for
minimum k, assuming k <= 8. This color map will be all zeros except this foreground index. This
option is useful if this text image should be integrated into other image colormap using their
colors.

-c R G B
The color to use as the foreground color. White by default.

-t text
One line of text can be provided on the command line. Note you must encapsulate the Text within
quotes if it has spaces (The quotes themselves are not treated as part of the text). If no -t option
is provided, stdin is read until end of file.

-h
Print one line command line help, similar to Usage above.

Synopsis

gifecho [-v] [-s colormap-size] [-f foreground] [-c RGB] [-t text] [-h] [gif-file]