PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

Long Distance Glider with sensational range!
Using an image clipping path for placing text. As an alternative to manually constructing
a path object with the path functions you can extract the clipping path from
an image and place text on the resulting path. The image must have been loaded with
the honorclippingpath option, and the clippingpathname option must also be supplied to
load_image( ) if the target path is not the image’s default clipping path:
image = p.load_image("auto", "image.tif", "clippingpathname={path 1}");
/* create a path object from the image’s clipping path */
path = (int) p.info_image(image, "clippingpath", "");
if (path == -1)
throw new Exception("Error: clipping path not found!");
/* Place text on the path */
p.fit_textline("Long Distance Glider with sensational range!", x, y,
"textpath={path=" + path + "} position={center bottom}");
Creating a gap between path and text. By default, PDFlib will place individual characters
on the path, which means that there will no space between the glyphs and the path.
If you want to create a gap between path and text you can simply increase the character
boxes. This can easily be achieved with boxheight suboption of the matchbox option
which specifies the vertical extension of the character boxes. The following option list
takes the descenders into account (see Figure 8.10):
p.fit_textline("Long Distance Glider with sensational range!", x, y,
"textpath={path=" + path + "} position={center bottom} " +
"matchbox={boxheight={capheight descender}}");
Fig. 8.11
Text on a path with an additional
gap between text and path
206 Chapter 8: Text and Table Formatting (Edition for COM, .NET, and REALbasic)