How does “imagettfbbox()” in PHP work?

Question

Could you please explain what exactly the return value of imagettfbbox() mean? The manual says:

imagettfbbox() returns an array with 8 el

Answer 1

The answer of Alain Tiemblo and Charles only partly worked for me, a few characters, like '1' weren't pixel perfect.

But the comment of blackbart at simail dot it on the same page worked very nice:

I wrote a simple function that calculates the exact bounding box (single pixel precision). The function returns an associative array with these keys: left, top: coordinates you will pass to imagettftext width, height: dimension of the image you have to create

function calculateTextBox($font_size, $font_angle, $font_file, $text) { $box = imagettfbbox($font_size, $font_angle, $font_file, $text); if( !$box ) return false; $min_x = min( array($box[0], $box[2], $box[4], $box[6]) ); $max_x = max( array($box[0], $box[2], $box[4], $box[6]) ); $min_y = min( array($box[1], $box[3], $box[5], $box[7]) ); $max_y = max( array($box[1], $box[3], $box[5], $box[7]) ); $width = ( $max_x - $min_x ); $height = ( $max_y - $min_y ); $left = abs( $min_x ) + $width; $top = abs( $min_y ) + $height; // to calculate the exact bounding box i write the text in a large image $img = @imagecreatetruecolor( $width << 2, $height << 2 ); $white = imagecolorallocate( $img, 255, 255, 255 ); $black = imagecolorallocate( $img, 0, 0, 0 ); imagefilledrectangle($img, 0, 0, imagesx($img), imagesy($img), $black); // for sure the text is completely in the image! imagettftext( $img, $font_size, $font_angle, $left, $top, $white, $font_file, $text); // start scanning (0=> black => empty) $rleft = $w4 = $width<<2; $rright = 0; $rbottom = 0; $rtop = $h4 = $height<<2; for( $x = 0; $x < $w4; $x++ ) for( $y = 0; $y < $h4; $y++ ) if( imagecolorat( $img, $x, $y ) ){ $rleft = min( $rleft, $x ); $rright = max( $rright, $x ); $rtop = min( $rtop, $y ); $rbottom = max( $rbottom, $y ); } // destroy img and serve the result imagedestroy( $img ); return array( "left" => $left - $rleft, "top" => $top - $rtop, "width" => $rright - $rleft + 1, "height" => $rbottom - $rtop + 1 ); }