Annotating a Photograph

2008-Nov23:  I decided to rewrite my photograph-annotating script (see scalepix & annotatepix in general-purpose-scripts.htm) using NetPBM routines, because for one thing my old one has been forcing me to keep around an ancient version of convert from ImageMagick -- that's a long sad story, but it involves ImageMagick making non-backward-compatible changes, which makes the reasonable person swear off ever again using it in a script.  (Not that NetPBM hasn't been guilty of the same thing, but its sins have been lesser ones:-)  The second reason, the one that got me to actually do the rewrite, was the desire to have anti-aliased text.  There's even a third benefit: the rewrite lets me use a PostScript font, which brings me back onto solid ground -- with the old method there was no way to feel confident about what the font choices were.

While experimenting, I noticed that a bold font was nice in cases having limited contrast between the background and ink colours;  however I found bold text too obtrusive in cases with good contrast.  That led me to muse about the need for parameterized fonts where one can specify the degree of boldness, and then to wonder whether the same effect couldn't be achieved by changing the colour, using off-white or off-black shades to get less boldness.  And that led to this image, which explains itself: