New line in an imagecreatefrompng.

[Teach]

Hello!

I hope you can help please.
We have the following script (scaled down for the purpose of this post) which creates an image based on data.
We want the text to have seperate lines, so it appears as:

Line1
Line2
Line3

At the moment, using the \n's we get a funny 'V T' type character (V on top, T at the bottom) wherever I have a \n, and it all appears on one line.

Any ideas?

<?php
session_start();

$text = "line 1\nline 2\nline 3";

// import background image
$img = @imagecreatefrompng("/path/to/file.png");
imagecreatetruecolor(450, 120);
// text color
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($img, 255, 255, 255);
// add the text to the image
imagestring($img, 3, 100, 50, $text, $textcolor);
// date in the past, so that the image is not cached by the browser
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
// tell the browser what it's about to recieve
header("Content-type: image/png");
// create the png image
imagepng($img, '', 75);
// clean up
imagedestroy($img);
  } else {
    echo "ERROR.";
  }
?>

[madwormer2]

You have to explode() and then do a foreach on the array, with a lower positioning each time.

[Teach]

Thanks for the reply.

I found another way before this reply..seems to be working okay and lets us set the correct spacing.

  $text1 = "line1";
  $text2 = "line2";
  $text3 = "line3";

and:

imagestring($img, 3, 95, 30, $text1, $textcolor);
imagestring($img, 3, 95, 45, $text2, $textcolor);
imagestring($img, 3, 95, 60, $text3, $textcolor);

This works fine, but I guess it's a waste as $img is called 3 times, so technically I guess it's loading the .png three times?

If there's a way to keep this event it would be better, but how can I get rid of $img on the text2/text3 lines to stop this wasting?

Thanks!!!

[madwormer2]

No, that's the way you do it.

The way I suggested is basically doing just that, but making the line1, line2, etc. dynamically.

If you're happy to do it that way, then that's the way to go about it.

You could do it like:

<?php
session_start();

$text = "line 1\nline 2\nline 3";

// import background image
$img = @imagecreatefrompng("/path/to/file.png");
imagecreatetruecolor(450, 120);
// text color
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($img, 255, 255, 255);
// add the text to the image
$textarr = explode("\n",$text);
$i = 30;
foreach($textarr as $a){
    imagestring($img, 3, 100, $i, $a, $textcolor);
$i=$i+15;
}

// date in the past, so that the image is not cached by the browser
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
// tell the browser what it's about to recieve
header("Content-type: image/png");
// create the png image
imagepng($img, '', 75);
// clean up
imagedestroy($img);
  } else {
    echo "ERROR.";
  }
?>