RENDERTEXT

Posible options:

• Lazy mswin guys_{(MY GUI THINK OF THE THING)}:

  · Windows BASE installer: (includes all you need to run rendertext, that is perl and GD for MS Windows)

  · Windows last version update (includes limited support for utf-8): (rendertext's last version update, you need BASE installed previously)

• Everybody_{(THE CONSOLE THING)}:

  · Standalone rendertext (includes limited support for utf-8) (all operating systems, but you have to take responsibility of having perl and GD installed correctly in your operating system)

You have these options because:

You will need perl, but all the perl platform you need comes with the rendertext package for Windows above. Other operating systems (including 64 bits versions of Microsoft Windows) need:

• rendertext sources (rendertext.pl, etc...)
• perl
• ...and the Thomas Boutell's perl GD library

... this way I think is more adapted to the habits of each OS different user. Since perl is a very good, very stable and very old language, there are enough perl distributions for Mac, Linux, BSD, etc... So thanks to perl rendertext can be used in virtually any operating system. But for not Windows you will need a system with perl and GD perl library installed or to take the effort to compile the GD library and install perl's GD module from cpan or get it via rpm, apt-get or whatever.

Installation

In the first case, if you are using any of Windows 32 bits operating systems and have downloaded the full Windows package, simply install it to a folder, and start using it. You can currently do it directly because now rendertext comes with Windows shell integration, that is right click in the file you want to generate the e-book from, and press Generate e-book using rendertext or using old style command line:

 perl rendertext.pl

...or to run the unicode enabled version, that allows you to render obscure mathematical symbols, and other rare (for ascii-milky-nippled people) but sexy globalized glyphing fauna:

perl rendertext+unifont.pl

In the second case, first check you have perl and GD installed, for example, using this command: perl -e "require GD and print 1" . If its output is a 1 all's ok, you can run rendertext.pl like another perl program, execute: perl rendertext.pl -h to see full help. If you have no perl or no GD installed, and you're not using Microsoft Windows, you'll need to install perl and perl's GD library, using your operating system software manager or one of the perl distributions, like Activestate's one, for example.

Important: full BASE package, that coming with perl for win32, will no longer be updated. For new versions simply use the version updater or download rendertext sources and replace all the old files in the package with these.