PHP: imagettftext

Description

array imagettftext ( resource image, float size, float angle, int x, int y, int color, string fontfile, string text )

image

The image resource. See imagecreate().

size

The font size. Depending on your version of GD, this should be specified as the pixel size (GD1) or point size (GD2).

angle

The angle in degrees, with 0 degrees being left-to-right reading text. Higher values represent a counter-clockwise rotation. For example, a value of 90 would result in bottom-to-top reading text.

x

The coordinates given by x and y will define the basepoint of the first character (roughly the lower-left corner of the character). This is different from the imagestring(), where x and y define the upper-left corner of the first character. For example, "top left" is 0, 0.

y

The y-ordinate. This sets the position of the fonts baseline, not the very bottom of the character.

color

The color index. Using the negative of a color index has the effect of turning off antialiasing. See imagecolorallocate().

fontfile

The path to the TrueType font you wish to use.

Depending on which version of the GD library PHP is using, when fontfile does not begin with a leading / then .ttf will be appended to the filename and the library will attempt to search for that filename along a library-defined font path.

When using versions of the GD library lower than 2.0.18, a space character, rather than a semicolon, was used as the 'path separator' for different font files. Unintentional use of this feature will result in the warning message: Warning: Could not find/open font. For these affected versions, the only solution is moving the font to a path which does not contain spaces.

In many cases where a font resides in the same directory as the script using it the following trick will alleviate any include problems.


<?php

// Set the enviroment variable for GD

putenv('GDFONTPATH=' . realpath('.'));



// Name the font to be used (note the lack of the .ttf extension)

$font = 'SomeFont';

?>

text

The text string.

May include decimal numeric character references (of the form: €) to access characters in a font beyond position 127. Strings in UTF-8 encoding can be passed directly.

If a character is used in the string which is not supported by the font, a hollow rectangle will replace the character.

imagettftext() returns an array with 8 elements representing four points making the bounding box of the text. The order of the points is lower left, lower right, upper right, upper left. The points are relative to the text regardless of the angle, so "upper left" means in the top left-hand corner when you see the text horizontally.

Przykład 1. imagettftext() example

This example script will produce a white PNG 400x30 pixels, with the words "Testing..." in black (with grey shadow), in the font Arial.


<?php

// Set the content-type

header("Content-type: image/png");



// Create the image

$im = imagecreate(400, 30);



// Create some colors

$white = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);

$grey = imagecolorallocate($im, 128, 128, 128);

$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);



// The text to draw

$text = 'Testing...';

// Replace path by your own font path

$font = 'arial.ttf';



// Add some shadow to the text

imagettftext($im, 20, 0, 11, 21, $grey, $font, $text);



// Add the text

imagettftext($im, 20, 0, 10, 20, $black, $font, $text);



// Using imagepng() results in clearer text compared with imagejpeg()

imagepng($im);

imagedestroy($im);

?>

This function requires both the GD library and the FreeType library.

See also imagettfbbox().

User Contributed Notes


I've found that upsampling your text by a factor of 8 or more can really improve the readability of generated text, especially in smaller font sizes (9 or less). I find it also helps with fonts that have kerning to reduce space between letters such as capital T and capital A (TA) where the top-right of the T will be cut off due to GD "features".



I can't tell you, the reader, exactly how to do this, as it will depend on how you are currently generating your text, but essentially what you want to try doing is upsize your font by a factor of 8 and then scale down the resulting image by the same factor.



So if you were using font size 10, use font size 80 and use imagecopyresampled() to divide the width/height down again by 8. The resulting image will be a few pixels different in width / height compared to direct text writing, so make sure to check your image sizes if you are using fixed dimensions.



Play around with other factors, 16 is a bit nicer but results in a higher CPU/RAM load when processing. Any higher is unnecessary I think. If possible you should also cache the image to a file instead of reprocessing it each request.


If you have problems displaying german umlauts or other chars with an ascii value > 127, try to convert the text-parameter first. The following function converts character-values > 127 (both: UTF-8 + ANSI) to HTML's numeric coded entities:



<?php

define('EMPTY_STRING', '');



function foxy_utf8_to_nce( 

  $utf = EMPTY_STRING 

) { 

  if($utf == EMPTY_STRING) return($utf); 



  $max_count = 5; // flag-bits in $max_mark ( 1111 1000 == 5 times 1) 

  $max_mark = 248; // marker for a (theoretical ;-)) 5-byte-char and mask for a 4-byte-char; 



  $html = EMPTY_STRING; 

  for($str_pos = 0; $str_pos < strlen($utf); $str_pos++) { 

    $old_chr = $utf{$str_pos}; 

    $old_val = ord( $utf{$str_pos} ); 

    $new_val = 0; 



    $utf8_marker = 0; 



    // skip non-utf-8-chars 

    if( $old_val > 127 ) { 

      $mark = $max_mark; 

      for($byte_ctr = $max_count; $byte_ctr > 2; $byte_ctr--) { 

        // actual byte is utf-8-marker? 

        if( ( $old_val & $mark  ) == ( ($mark << 1) & 255 ) ) { 

          $utf8_marker = $byte_ctr - 1; 

          break; 

        } 

        $mark = ($mark << 1) & 255; 

      } 

    } 



    // marker found: collect following bytes 

    if($utf8_marker > 1 and isset( $utf{$str_pos + 1} ) ) { 

      $str_off = 0; 

      $new_val = $old_val & (127 >> $utf8_marker); 

      for($byte_ctr = $utf8_marker; $byte_ctr > 1; $byte_ctr--) { 



        // check if following chars are UTF8 additional data blocks 

        // UTF8 and ord() > 127 

        if( (ord($utf{$str_pos + 1}) & 192) == 128 ) { 

          $new_val = $new_val << 6; 

          $str_off++; 

          // no need for Addition, bitwise OR is sufficient 

          // 63: more UTF8-bytes; 0011 1111 

          $new_val = $new_val | ( ord( $utf{$str_pos + $str_off} ) & 63 ); 

        } 

        // no UTF8, but ord() > 127 

        // nevertheless convert first char to NCE 

        else { 

          $new_val = $old_val; 

        } 

      } 

      // build NCE-Code 

      $html .= '&#'.$new_val.';'; 

      // Skip additional UTF-8-Bytes 

      $str_pos = $str_pos + $str_off; 

    } 

    else { 

      $html .= chr($old_val); 

      $new_val = $old_val; 

    } 

  } 

  return($html); 

}

?>


Hi all!

When my hoster updated his php's libs at first minutes i've got the same problem as some of you.

Php couldn't find the path to true type fonts.

The solution in my case was to make the path look like this

<?php

imagettftext($im, 20, 0, 620, 260, $secondary_color, "./tahoma.ttf" , "NEWS");

?>

so as you can see i simply added "./"



another tip that i wanted to add here is how to write in RUssian on image using imagettftext

you simply have to change the function argument like this

<?php

imagettftext($im, 15, 0, 575, 300, $secondary_color, "./tahoma.ttf" , win2uni("some word in russian"));

 ?>

where win2uni is the function that converts win1251 to unicode. here is the code of it

<?php 



  //  Windows 1251 -> Unicode

  function win2uni($s)

  {

    $s = convert_cyr_string($s,'w','i'); //  win1251 -> iso8859-5

    //  iso8859-5 -> unicode:

    for ($result='', $i=0; $i<strlen($s); $i++) {

      $charcode = ord($s[$i]);

      $result .= ($charcode>175)?"&#".(1040+($charcode-176)).";":$s[$i];

    }

    return $result;

  }

?>



That's all today! Thanks for your attention!

Alex


A correction to Paul Reinheimer's note above regarding this PHP error:



Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagettftext().



Paul states that you need XPM libraries to resolve this issue.  This is not true.  There is an error message that originates from "configure" which mistakenly shows itself when other components are missing.  For instance, if you tell "configure" to add JPEG support, and it can't find the libraries, it will tell you it can't find the JPEG libraries AND it will recommend adding --with-xpm to solve the problem.  This recommendation is ill-placed and misleading.



I received the same error message above, along with the recommendation to add XPM supprt.  However I resolved it by adding the --with-freetype-dir  AND --enable-gd-native-ttf  options  to the "configure" command line.  I did _not_ need XPM.



There are other variations to this error message, such as the script recommending adding JPEG support or PNG support to resolve it's own inability to locate other libraries.  The script needs some cleanup in order to fix these poorly placed recommendations.



FYI, imagettftext() is a call to one of the truetype fonts functions.  It is NOT related in any way to the XPM libraries, so it is not required unless you explicitly want XPM functionality.