imagettftext and special chars.

[sifredi]

I have a problem related to swedish or german characters (åäöÅÄÖ). I have made a page (image.php) that uses the $_GET['text'] variable to render a .png image from text using the imagettftext function and a custom true type font. It all works fine, except for the special chars.

I use ISO-8859-1 as encoding and printing out simple a simple "Ö" using HTML is no problem. But the image engine doesn't like it.

Whats strange is that I can call this file externally like

image.php?text=ÅÄÖ

and it works. But when I try to pick up text from my database and render it via the image.php file like

image.php?text=$row->text

it breaks down.

I have tried everything from urldecode() to custom made decodes, utf8 encoding. Could anyone explain to me how these things work, since I couldn't find anything that explains it?

thanks a lot.

[jatar_k]

my first thought is whether this method

image.php?text=$row->text

is actually writing to the url the same thing as the one above it? What do you see in the url? does it show the right characters but then not in the image?