Question

I need to annotate an image with Chinese Text and I am using Imagick library right now.

An example of a Chinese Text is

这是中文

The Chinese Font file used is this

The file originally is named 华文黑体.ttf

it can also be found in Mac OSX under /Library/Font

I have renamed it to English STHeiTi.ttf make it easier to call the file in php code.

In particular the Imagick::annotateImage function

I also am using the answer from “How can I draw wrapped text using Imagick in PHP?”.

The reason why I am using it is because it is successful for English text and application needs to annotate both English and Chinese, though not at the same time.

The problem is that when I run the annotateImage using Chinese text, I get annotation that looks like 罍

Code included here

Answer 1

Full solution here:

https://gist.github.com/2971092/232adc3ebfc4b45f0e6e8bb5934308d9051450a4

Key ideas:

Must set the html charset and internal encoding on the form and on the processing page

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('utf-8');

These lines must be at the top lines of the php files.

Use this function to determine if text is Chinese and use the right font file

function isThisChineseText($text) {
    return preg_match("/\p{Han}+/u", $text);
}

For more details check out https://stackoverflow.com/a/11219301/80353

Set TextEncoding properly in ImagickDraw object

$draw = new ImagickDraw();

// set utf 8 format
$draw->setTextEncoding('UTF-8');

Note the Capitalized UTF. THis was helpfully pointed out to me by Walter Tross in his answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11207521/80353

Use preg_match_all to explode English words, Chinese Words and spaces

// separate the text by chinese characters or words or spaces
preg_match_all('/([\w]+)|(.)/u', $text, $matches);
$words = $matches[0];

Inspired by this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/4113903/80353

Works just as well for english text