Open OTF fonts with php - greek characters included

Question

So, as the title says, my task is to convert a given phrase to an image on server side (php GD) with a selected .otf font. The phrase can include not only latin characters but also greek and cyrillic.

PHP's imagettftext (http://php.net/manual/en/function.imagettftext.php) won't work with non-latin characters on .otf fonts (works ok with .ttf as it seems).

Any clues?

EDIT: Font needs to be .otf

Radiograph

Why not convert it to TTF then? – Darwindarwinian

and do it for free at :freefontconverter.com – Dubiety

my bad for haven't added this to the question: I need the features .otf offers that aren't present in .ttf – Radiograph

What features are those exactly? – Sniggle

It is a good question whether you need those features for this image-conversion, or for something else. You could store them in two different formats. – Darwindarwinian

for image conversio. To give you the full picture: It's for a store that sells fonts and it needs an online presentation of it's fonts in the way that I described it before. Enter text + choose font + other features like underlines or whatever + produce image. – Radiograph

well in short nothing in native php will do this, you will have to look at other applications you can run on the server. – Dubiety

Answer 1

Posting rough answer that seems to work for future people bumping on this post:

Solution seemed to be: 1) open OTF with LATEX server side 2) produce PDF 3) convert to image with ImageMagick library.

Radiograph

Answer 2

Use imagefttext function instead. It has the same arguments and usage as imagettftext, but uses the FreeType 2 library which supports OpenType and plenty of other font formats.

It doesn't support OpenType's layout tables however. See FreeType 2's FAQ for more info.

Countercheck

have you tried imagefttext with non-latin characters? Can't seem to get it to work either. Getting that annoying rectangle. – Radiograph