I've been wondering how I was going to write this journal entry, so I think I'm just going to explain slowly.
Firstly, The 2001 Advent Calendar is up at http://twoshortplanks.com/xmas. Knock yourself out.
I'd been planning to do another Perl Advent Calendar since last year, and I'd been looking forward to it for ages. And then during the start of November, I made plans to go away and I got all tied up with that. But not to worry, I thought, I'd be easy to do. Everything is still set up from last year.
Wrong
Of course, as you know from my last journal entry, my box got cracked while I was away in Barbados, and we reinstalled from scratch. Everyone did a wonderful job in getting the thing back up and working ASAP, but there were some holes. One of these was GD.pm.
Now try as I might, I can't get GD.pm to work with TrueType fonts. GD (for those of you not familiar with it) works by using the FreeType library to do all the hard work. I've tried installing it from source, from binary, from RPM. Basically with every compile time option under the sun. And then I got acme and muttley to have a go. It just doesn't want to work.
GD is used by my site to automatically produce graphics for text...so whenever there are buttons with text on them, heading that are png or jpgs, you know GD has created them. I can't get on with the GIMP and I hate graphics packages. Normally this is done dynamically with a custom 404 document - literally whenever a graphic is requested that is missing the system creates it and saves it to the right place on disk. This year all the titles were going to be created in happy xmas fonts (the "SYNOPSIS" and "DESCRIPTION" sections et al.) and we were going to have nice baubles for the doors for each day.
And it doesn't work. Grumble grumble, Bah Humbug.
