dynamic images

Superdog

Hi everyone,

I know the GD library in PHP is fundamental to creating images. I want to use imagettftext() (I can't use imagepstext()) to create a text logo, which is easy - the hard bit is I have to create spacing between the characters. As I mentioned before I can't use pstext...
I was thinking I could break the string up into characters, then dyanamically create a new image for each character - thus controlling the spacing.
Then merge them all together, to create the logo.
The problem is I can't seem to dynamically create the images. I tried using variable variables, with no success.

Could anyone help please, I am running headlong out of ideas.

-Superdog

drawmack

you give it the x and y cooridance in imagetftext, so instead of all this image creation and merging (which will kill your processor) just make one image but to each letter one at a time with a seperate call to imagetftect.

Superdog

Thanks drawmack,

Just have one more issue now...
The kerning between letters. The spaces are fine, but the kerning is an issue. for example in the string "primary industries" the characters with the thinnest weight ("i" as opposed to a "h") have too much space around them.

Anyway you can think to rectify this?

-Superdog

Weedpacket

As far as proportional spacing goes (i.e., taking into account the fact that 'i' is narrower than 'm'), you could use [man]imagettfbbox[/man] to get (the font's idea of) how wide each character is, and use that (and the desired spacing between them) to figure out the coordinates of successive characters.

For kerning adjustments between pairs of characters (e.g., when the bounding boxes of "A" and "V" have a bit of negative space inserted between them when rendering "AV", so that they overlap slightly), I have fewer ideas.