create image with text from html table

loba

Hi,

I understand that there's currently a imagecreatefrompng() that allows coders to create an image on the fly and input text with imagestring().

at this moment, i'm faced with the problem of trying to the same thing but with indentation such that i can specify where i want to place the text on the image. using the generic functions will only enable me to specify where the text will start but what i would like to do is create an image from a html table -->

e.g.

</table>

this way , i can specify top, left, bottom and even msg indentation width/ height...

so is there anyway i can convert it into an image?

AstroTeg

I don't believe there's any way around doing this besides just doing the math. I believe there's functions in the GD/PHP library that let you find the pixel length of a string of text using a particular font. If you know the length of the string in pixels, the length of the image, you can figure out how to left/right center the text. To vertically center the text, you just need to know your image height and your text height and with a little math, you can get the top pixel location where you should place your text. Are you stuck on the math? Or stuck on figuring out how to get the string height and length?

loba

actually, that would be possible if its a standard width and height for placing of text. however, the width and height supposedly changes with the background i.e. if a different background is used, then the width and height will also change... and the text length is dependent on what the user inputs... currently i store all texts, background image, width and height in the DB. i do understand the general theory behind what u mean but i'm stucked with getting the algorithm out.

if its not too much of a trouble, could you help please?

AstroTeg

There's a lot of nifty functions here: http://www.php.net/gd

Two you might want to look at: imagefontheight and imagefontwidth. You load the font (it could be even a user supplied font if you like). Check out the imagefontwidth page for sample code on determining the length of a string.

With these two functions you'll have 2 of the 4 pieces of needed info. The last 2 pieces are the dimensions of the image. You said it changes. You'll need to know which image to use before outputting it to the browser, right? If not, then that's a definite problem. But I'm taking a guess you'll know which image is being requested before hand and with that, you can use one of the gd functions to calculate its width and height.