coding  opensource >> TIC – Text Image Converter (207 views)

This is a php5 library (two classes) I wrote to convert TrueType Font text into an image, using the GD library.
The project is hosted and can be downloaded from github: http://github.com/hayate/tic (it includes an example, documentation and some free fonts)
or using git: git clone git://github.com/hayate/tic.git
Documentation is also available online here: http://www.andreabelvedere.com/docs/tic/

To extend the library to add support for other Font types just extend the TIC abstract class and implement the create and dimension methods.

See example below on how to use it:

<?php
/**
 * @file image.php
 */
require_once 'lib/tic.php';
 
TIC::factory('fonts/AAJAX.TTF')
    ->setText('Hello World !')
    ->setBgColor(0x00, 0xff, 0xff)
    ->setFontColor(0x00, 0x00, 0x00)
    ->setFontSize(24)->create(true);

Than in your html:

<img src="image.php" alt="TIC" />

That will output the following image:

TIC

The library is under the LGPL license, which means you can freely use it for commercial and non commercial applications, please post a comment for feedbacks, bugs, or links of projects where you have use it.

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2 Responses to “TIC – Text Image Converter”

  1. Martin says:
    July 26, 2009 at 6:35 pm

    How is it possible to generate images from TTF fonts for chinese characters? I do not know how to get those UNICODE characters as arguments to setText. I did also try to use the PHP image library directly but ran into similar problems, the PHP-chr() function allows only ASCII.

    I do have TTF font files (from university of Heidelberg) and want to generate chinese texts from a database using PHP.

  2. andrea belvedere says:
    July 27, 2009 at 11:52 am

    Hi Martin,
    I am not sure I have fully understood what you are asking, however I have run this test with a Japanese font and it works perfectly:

    <?php
require_once dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) . '/tic/lib/tic.php';
 
$fontfile = dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) . '/tic/fonts/ttf-japanese-mincho.ttf';
$tic = TIC::factory($fontfile);
$tic->setText('アンドレア')
->setBackground(0xaa, 0xaa, 0xaa)
->setColor(array(0x00, 0x00, 0x00))
->setPadding(5)
->create(true); // create and output
?>

    And the output is here below:
    andrea

    In your case you will pass text to setText as follow: setText($unicode); where $unicode will hold your unicode string from the database.
    Hope this helps.
    Andrea

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by andrea belvedere, last updated May 19th, 2010