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phpvips

Overlay text with php-vips


I'm trying to write a PHP function to overlay text onto an image using the php-vips library. Looking through the documentation I can't find a function that draws text in the libvips documentation here and the php-vips documentation here doesn't provide a ton of detail and seems to just direct you to use the libvips documentation. I found a snippet in one of php-vips issues (this) but it uses a text function that doesn't exist in the current php-vips library. Does anyone know if it's possible to draw text onto an image with php-vips and if so how it is done? For reference my use case is to draw the timestamp for a photo over the photo when downloaded by PDF.


Solution

  • I made you a demo program:

    #!/usr/bin/php 
    <?php
    require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
    use Jcupitt\Vips;
    
    $image = Vips\Image::newFromFile($argv[1], ['access' => 'sequential']);
    
    // this renders the text to a one-band image ... set width to the pixels across
    // of the area we want to render to to have it break lines for you
    $text = Vips\Image::text('Hello world!', [
      'font' => 'sans 120', 
      'width' => $image->width - 100
    ]);
    // make a constant image the size of $text, but with every pixel red ... tag it
    // as srgb
    $red = $text->newFromImage([255, 0, 0])->copy(['interpretation' => 'srgb']);
    // use the text mask as the alpha for the constant red image
    $overlay = $red->bandjoin($text);
    
    // composite the text on the image
    $out = $image->composite($overlay, "over", ['x' => 100, 'y' => 100]);
    
    $out->writeToFile($argv[2]);
    

    I can run it like this:

    $ ./render_text.php ~/pics/tiny_marble.jpg x.jpg
    

    To Make:

    output image

    The docs for the text method are here:

    https://libvips.github.io/php-vips/docs/classes/Jcupitt.Vips.ImageAutodoc.html#method_text

    Unfortunately phpdoc markup doesn't let us generate docs for the options. You need to refer to the full libvips docs here:

    https://libvips.github.io/libvips/API/current/libvips-create.html#vips-text