Graphics

Roxen can dynamically draw graphical images that are sent to the browser. This can be used in a number of ways. Headers that need to be graphical to get the right typefaces can be created by the server instead of being created manually. This makes it far easier to handle since the headers are the only text in an RXML tag. To create new headers or change old ones you only need to change the tag, there is no need to use a drawing program.

Roxen can also draw dynamic diagrams. Instead of creating a static report you can utilize Challenger to make the report contain diagrams that always show the current data in your database.

Dynamically drawing graphical images takes more CPU than serving static pages. If you run your server with several threads this should not have any impact on performance. All graphical modules make use of caches, which means that the graphics on a page will only be drawn once regardless of how many times the page is requested.

Image file formats

Roxen's graphical tags generate GIF, JPEG or PNM images. Some tags use images as input, <gtext> can for example use an image as background. The images used for input can be in GIF, JPEG, PSD (PhotoShop), PNM, PNG, TIFF or XCF (Gimp) format.

Fonts

Roxen supports TrueType fonts, as well as the older bitmapped Roxen font format. The two fonts included in the distribution, avant_garde and lucida is in the older format. It is however much better to use TrueType fonts, since it is possible to scale them to any size with no bad effects.

On Windows Roxen should be able to use all installed fonts. Since there are no special place for installed fonts on Unix you will have to make sure that the Fonts.../Font directories variable includes the directories where your fonts are stored. In case you want to install fonts that are only to be used by Roxen we suggest using the local/fonts directory.