Page 572 - Beginning PHP 5.3

Part III: Using PHP in Practice
❑ The text color, as a color index (as returned by imagecolorallocate() , for example)
❑ The full path to the font ( .ttf ) file on your server ’ s hard disk
❑ The string of text to draw

imagefttext() draws the text, then returns an eight - element array representing the four corner points
of the bounding box enclosing the drawn text:

Element Index Description
0 The x-coordinate of the lower-left corner
1 The y-coordinate of the lower-left corner

2 The x-coordinate of the lower-right corner
3 The y-coordinate of the lower-right corner
4 The x-coordinate of the upper-right corner

5 The y-coordinate of the upper-right corner
6 The x-coordinate of the upper-left corner
7 The y-coordinate of the upper-left corner

This means that you can find out exactly how much space the drawn text has taken up in your image. This
is useful if you then want to draw more text or shapes that are positioned relative to the text you ’ ve
just drawn.

Try It Out Draw Text with a TrueType Font
Here’s an example script that displays some text using a TrueType font. Save the code as truetype.
php in your document root folder and run the script in your Web browser. (If you don’t have the Vera
font installed at /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera/Vera.ttf, change the script
to point to a TrueType font that you do have installed.)

<?php
$textImage = imagecreate( 200, 120 );
$white = imagecolorallocate( $textImage, 255, 255, 255 );
$black = imagecolorallocate( $textImage, 0, 0, 0 );
imagefttext( $textImage, 16, 0, 10, 50, $black, “/usr/share/fonts/truetype/
ttf-bitstream-vera/Vera.ttf”, “Vera, 16 pixels” );
header( “Content-type: image/png” );
imagepng( $textImage );
imagedestroy( $textImage );
?>

Figure 17-24 shows the resulting text.

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