himsoklong / render-lizard

Render sample texts rapidly across multiple browsers and platforms

Render Lizard

A test platform to rapidly generate snapshots of render data for font validation

Security Warning: Render Lizard has known security limitations. The save.php and save-metadata.php scripts could be misused to put arbitrary files into the data folder on your web server. Any site visitor could create or delete results. Consider yourself warned.

Similar Tools

New 2020-08-19: See Lindenberg Software's ImageCollector for a more polished solution inspired by Render Lizard.

Setup

Data files must at present be put into the filesystem; they cannot be uploaded by the site. Data files are a simple text file format. See the sample data file in the folder data/1/.

• The file must be called tests.txt.
• Lines beginning with hash (#) are ignored.
• Blank lines are ignored (including whitespace)
• All other lines are tests.
• # on a test line marks the start of a "note" that will be displayed in the notes column
• Any one-word notes will be applied as a class to the test row.
• The note valid has a CSS rule to make the row green.

Font suggestions can be specified for a test in the fonts.txt file. Each font name should be on a separate line with filename.ttf,facename, one on each line.

The fonts should be included in the same folder as fonts.txt.

Each test should be a in a folder in the data folder. Folders names must be integer values at present.

Running with Docker

You can run the site in Docker.

• Install docker (on Linux, Windows, and Mac) - https://docker.com/

• To Start: in terminal, run ./build.sh build start

• To Use: in browser, go to http://localhost:8060/index.php?id=1

• To Stop: in terminal, run ./build.sh stop

Accessing the site

Load index.php?id=<integer-test-id> in your browser, e.g. index.php?id=1

Using the renderer to do tests

Select the font, font size and line spacing (necessary for many Indic languages). Then click Render. A new column will be added with a .png file for each test word. The results are stored on the server, so reloading the page will keep the results. This makes testing against multiple operating systems and devices straightforward.