I have found the kerning (spacing between letters) pretty poor with GD - it's not up to your average designer's standards. Here are some ways to improve it:
- Place the letters one by one using their bounding box instead of using one string
- adjust with a $kerning value
- For small text, sample it down from a larger size to adjust in increments less than 1px
Eg:
<?PHP
$STRING = "NOTRE PHILOSOPHIE";
$FONT = "CantoriaMTStd-SemiBold.otf";
$FONT_SIZE = 10.5;
$WIDTH = 200;
$HEIGHT = 16;
$KERNING = 0;
$BASELINE = 12;
$BG_COLOR = array(
"R"=>5,
"G"=>45,
"B"=>53
);
$TXT_COLOR = array(
"R"=>188,
"G"=>189,
"B"=>0
);
$canvas = imageCreateTrueColor($WIDTH*4,$HEIGHT*4);
$bg_color = imageColorAllocate($canvas, $BG_COLOR["R"], $BG_COLOR["G"], $BG_COLOR["B"]);
$txt_color = imageColorAllocate($canvas, $TXT_COLOR["R"], $TXT_COLOR["G"], $TXT_COLOR["B"]);
imagefill ( $canvas, 0, 0, $bg_color );
$array = str_split($STRING);
$hpos = 0;
for($i=0; $i<count($array); $i++)
{
$bbox = imagettftext( $canvas, $FONT_SIZE*4, 0, $hpos, $BASELINE*4, $txt_color, $FONT, $array[$i] );
$hpos = $bbox[2]+$KERNING;
}
$final = imageCreateTrueColor($WIDTH,$HEIGHT);
imageCopyResampled( $final, $canvas, 0,0,0,0, $WIDTH, $HEIGHT, $WIDTH*4, $HEIGHT*4 );
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagePNG($final);
imageDestroy($canvas);
imageDestroy($final);
?>
