PostScript/TTF Font Dynamic Image Preview using Mac fonts: gd, imagemagick, preview, dynamic

PostScript/TTF Font Dynamic Image Preview using Mac fonts

I am working on a font preview script for a photography website. I need a font previewer script so people can see their name in each font, similar to http://www.rockyourheadshot.com/fonts.aspx

I am building it in PHP and have two files so far: choose-your-font.php and preview.php. The sources to each are in the code block.

This works fine on two conditions:
1) The font is a TrueType file. Perfect. No problems whatsoever.
2) The font is a Windows *.pfb PostScript Type 1 font. This is where the problem is.

I need it to work with Mac PostScript fonts. No matter how I modify the script, imagepsloadfont won't allow them. This is bad for two reasons... The first being that the PostScript fonts are ALL Mac fonts. The second issue is that the T1lib PHP extension (used for PostScript GD handling) has a major bug; any imageps* functions that crash will not recover. If I put in one corrupted font file, the rest won't work until I remove that file and restart the server. This obviously can't be done on shared hosting.

The server is *nix so I obviously can't run ASP. CGI doesn't seem to be working, it always returns an Internal Server Error no matter what I do (permissions and placing in cgi-bin, all it was was a "Hello World" script). The PHP installation doesn't have ImageMagick installed, which I think would be my best bet.

Can anyone help me find any solutions to this problem? If you need phpinfo, the phpinfo file for the server is attached. The user id and the subdomain have been removed. Ask any questions you have and I should reply within an hour.

/*choose-your-font.php*/
	$text = $_GET['text'];
 
	$directory = "./fonts/";
	$fonts_ttf = glob("" . $directory . "*.[Tt][Tt][Ff]");
	$fonts_pfb = glob("" . $directory . "*.[Pp][Ff][Bb]");
	
	$fonts = array_merge($fonts_ttf, $fonts_pfb);
	
	natcasesort($fonts);
 
	foreach($fonts as $font)
	{
		$parts = pathinfo($font);
		$font_name = $parts['filename'];
		$ext = $parts['extension'];
		
		echo <<<REGION
 
		$font_name<br /><img src="preview.php?font=$font_name&amp;ext=$ext&amp;text=$text" alt="$text written in $font_name" /> <br /><br /><br />
 
REGION;
	}
 
 
/******************************************************************************************************************
*******************************************************************************************************************/
/*preview.php*/
<?php
header("Content-type: image/png");
$im = @imagecreate(480, 35)
    or die("Cannot Initialize new GD image stream");
$white = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
 
$text = $_GET['text'];
$font_name = $_GET['font'];
$ext = $_GET['ext'];
 
if(strtolower($ext) == "ttf")
{
	$font = "./fonts/$font_name.ttf";
	imagettftext($im, 20, 0, 11, 28, $black, $font, $text);
}
if(strtolower($ext) == "pfb")
{
	$font = imagepsloadfont(realpath("./fonts/$font_name.pfb"));
	imagepstext($im, $text, $font, 20, $black, $white, 11, 28);
}
 
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>

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phpinfo.txt
- 53 KB
PHP Info for the server, userid and domain removed. Replace .txt with .html.

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PostScript/TTF Font Dynamic Image Preview using Mac fonts

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gd

imagemagick

preview

dynamic

PHP Scripting Language

Font Software

Mac OS X

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