Leaderboard

A few notes about text bounding boxes which, I hope, will help in precise placement of your text. Suppose I have the text string "The lazy fox" which I want to display using 150pt Vivaldi . My image is 4896 x 3672 and I want the text placed at the bottom right but 250 pixels from the edges of the image. $box = imagettfbbox(150,0,'c:/windows/fonts/vivaldii.ttf','The lazy fox'); gives this array of coordinates of the four corners $box = Array ( [0] => 23 [1] => 55 [2] => 871 [3] => 55 [4] => 871 [5] => -140 [6] => 23 [7] => -140 ) You may wonder why it can't just give a rectangle from (0,0) to (width, height) to make sizing simple, but there is extra information to be extracted from the array Text width = (871 - 23) = 848 Text height = 55 - (-140) = 195 The baseline will be 140px from the top The text is offset 23 px to the right. My text, therefore, will be in a rectangle 848 x 195 positioned 250 px from right and bottom edges. The top left x coord of the rectangle will be (4896 - 250 - 848) = 3798 and top left y coord will be (3672 - 250 - 195) = 3227. However, to land the text precisely into this area we position it on the baseline and at the required x offset, ie (3798 - 23 , 3227 + 140) = (3775, 3367). I use a simple custom function to assist with this process function metrics($font, $fsize, $str) { $box = imagettfbbox($fsize, 0, $font, $str); $ht = abs($box[5] - $box[1]); $wd = abs($box[4] - $box[0]); $base = -$box[5]; $tx = -$box[0]; return [ 'width' => $wd, 'height' => $ht, 'ascent' => $base, 'offsetx' => $tx ]; } $box = metrics ('c:/windows/fonts/vivaldii.ttf', 150, 'The lazy fox'); $box = Array ( [width] => 848 [height] => 195 [ascent] => 140 [offsetx] => -23 )

The braces are required when embedding complex variable names (an array element) inside other things. Without them you would get a syntax error. You could use concatenation (dots) to avoid this but with the braces you can skip the concatenating and just compose one contiguous string here. The thing I wanted you to note was the quotes on the array indices. A Key thing!

echo "<a href='{$row['link']}' target='_blank'>&diams;&nbsp;&nbsp; {$row['title']}</a><br>";

Note that is for the fixed-width fonts that GD supports out of the box. With TTF fonts, character widths vary so calculating the right offset is a bit harder.