Working with GD ( imagettftext() ) and UTF-8 characters

Question

Just for the record - my first question here but hopefully not my last input in the community. But that\'s not why I\'m here.

I\'m currently developing a simple syst

Answer 1

As I continued my research I came up with an answer for my problem, this piece of code did it!

private function properText($text){
    $text = mb_convert_encoding($text, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8");
    $text = preg_replace('~^(&([a-zA-Z0-9]);)~',htmlentities('${1}'),$text);
    return($text); 
}

Now all the characters (and all the new ones I've seen) that troubled me are displayed correctly!

Answer 2

In first place make sure your IDE is not saving file in another encoding than UTF8. For example new Intellij IDEA 9 changed UTF-8 to WINDOWS-1250 on Windows platform. If you won't notice that and you will use constant strings for testing, it is pretty crazy to debug.