Fun with Text

Hello all,

I thought I'd release this little thing I've been dabbling with for a while in case anyone finds it useful. It's called TextMap and it's basically a bitmap for text. The idea is to be able to do the kind of text layout stuff you often need to do in a script: drawing tables and nicely formatted status reports and the like -- in a much less awkward way than the usual method of scan converting everything line by line.

TextMap is a Lua class that behaves much like an image class you'd expect to find in a graphics library. It can copy, paste, fill, draw lines and boxes, tile, draw gradients, and there's a simple lighting effect. When the image is finished you can convert it to plain text, ANSI, or MUSHclient's ColourNote format.

I've put up a very lame 3 minute webpage where you can download the script and a demo plugin that makes use of it, and there are some screenshots:

http://pink.olifaunt.googlepages.com/textmap

Any feedback and bug reports are welcome, and I'd be interested to see any pretty pictures anyone manages to make with it :)

This looks quite interesting. If this things is easily used on the fly, one could make a mapper, or many other things even.

Nice job.

-Onoitsu2