The Essential Collection of Web Development Tools

This is a simple image creator to make images out of text. It uses functions in the GD library for PHP. The image is updated automatically when the specifications form inputs are changed (except for the text) with some simple Javascript. The image created is in .png format and if you click the download link, the file is saved as text_image.png.

Requests for additional features/image attributes can be submitted through the comments section.

And since this is a nice example of using the GD Library, here’s the code:

class text_image_creator {

 function text_image_creator($text, $font="AmericanaItalicBT.ttf", $font_size = 20, $text_color = "#000000", $background_color = "#FFFFFF", $download = false) {

   $font = getcwd()."/fonts/".$font;

   $textbox = imagettfbbox($font_size, 0, $font, $text);

/*RETURN VALUES FOR IMAGETTFBBOX
	0	lower left corner, X position
	1	lower left corner, Y position
	2	lower right corner, X position
	3	lower right corner, Y position
	4	upper right corner, X position
	5	upper right corner, Y position
	6	upper left corner, X position	(0,0)
	7	upper left corner, Y position
*/
//	BUILD IMAGE WITH A PADDING OF 1X THE FONT SIZE
   $height = $textbox[1] + 2*$font_size;	//compensate for large tff files
   $width = $textbox[2] + $font_size;

   $image = @imagecreate($width, $height) or die('Cannot Initialize new GD image stream');
   $bc_array = get_rgb_values($background_color);

   $background_color = imagecolorallocatealpha($image, $bc_array['r'], $bc_array['g'], $bc_array['b'], 0);
   $tc_array = get_rgb_values($text_color);
   $text_color = imagecolorallocate($image, $tc_array['r'], $tc_array['g'], $tc_array['b']);

//	COMPUTE POSITION COORDINATES
   $pos_x = ($width - $textbox[4])/2;
   $pos_y = ($height - $textbox[3])/2 + ($font_size/2);

   imagettftext($image, $font_size, 0, $pos_x, $pos_y, $text_color, $font , $text);

   header('Content-Type: image/png');
   if($download) header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=text_image.png');
   imagepng($image);
   imagedestroy($image);
  }

}	

function get_rgb_values($color) {
  $color = str_replace("#", "", $color);
  $a['r'] = hexdec(substr($color, 0, 2));
  $a['g'] = hexdec(substr($color, 2, 2));
  $a['b'] = hexdec(substr($color, 4, 2));
  return $a;
}

if(isset($_GET['text']) AND $_GET['text'] != '') $text = urldecode($_GET['text']);
 else $text = "Sample";

if(isset($_GET['font']) AND $_GET['font'] != '') $font = urldecode($_GET['font']);
 else $font="AmericanaItalicBT.ttf";

if(isset($_GET['font_size']) AND $_GET['font_size'] != '') $font_size = urldecode($_GET['font_size']);
 else $font_size = 20;

if(isset($_GET['text_color']) AND $_GET['text_color'] != '') $text_color = urldecode($_GET['text_color']);
 else $text_color = "#000000";

if(isset($_GET['background_color']) AND $_GET['background_color'] != '') $background_color = urldecode($_GET['background_color']);
 else $background_color = "#FFFFFF";

new text_image_creator($text, $font, $font_size, $text_color, $background_color, $_GET['download']);