TL;DR

Adding support for horizontal text alignment in PDF::Collage.

My (extremely) low-tech PDF template system PDF::Collage allows assembing a new PDF with some basic operations, like taking a page from another PDF or adding some text/images on top of a page.

Most of the times, this is just sufficient to get the job done. Although… the job can get done in a nicer way, sometimes.

One such occasion is when you have a letter (in the sense of the type of document) and some elements, like the recipient name/address, are written on the top-right, hopefully aligned to the right border. This is where aligning the text comes… handy.

I’m not aware of any way of doing this natively in PDF, and I doubt there is because of its nature. But… PDF::Builder::Resource::BaseFont has an aptly named width method that allows us to calculate the size of a string, so we’re done right?

This is how the text operation has evolved to take this into account:

sub _op_add_text ($self, $command) {
   my $opts =
     $self->_expand($command, qw< align page
        font font_family font_size x y >);

   my $content =
     $self->_render_text($opts->@{qw< text text_template text_var >});

   my $font = $self->_font($opts->{font} // $opts->{font_family});
   my $font_size = $opts->{font_size};

   my ($x, $y) = map { $_ // 0 } $opts->@{qw< x y >};

   my $align = $opts->{align} // 'start';
   if ($align ne 'start') {
      my $width = $font_size * $font->width($content);
      $x -= $align eq 'end' ? $width : ($width / 2);
   }

   my $page = $self->_pdf->open_page(__pageno($opts->{page} // 'last'));
   my $text = $page->text;
   $text->position($x, $y);
   $text->font($font, $opts->{font_size});
   $text->text($content // '');

   return $self;
} ## end sub _op_add_text

There’s been some reshuffling because we need to know the fully rendered string, as well as the reference X position, before we make any use of the new align option that we can fit into the several text operations. Then, we’ll stick to the following convention:

• a missing value, an undefined value, or string start means that the text is aligned to the… start
• end means that the text is aligned to the… end
• everything else means that the text is aligned to the center.

A bit crude but it should work.

Anything different from start (or its equivalents) mean that we have to calculate the right X position for the start, by subtracting the right amount depending on the needed alignment.

One interesting thing about the width is that it assumes that the font is 1-pt sized… so it’s necessary (and sufficient!) to multiply by the actual font size and we have the whole string size. Neat!

Stay safe!