As I’ve mentioned previously, every once in a while I manage to come up with a bit of code that doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere on the web, and if that code is useful I see it as a duty to share it with the world, as a way of saying thanks to all the coders who’ve helped me over the years by sharing similar bits.

Here’s one of those bits. While I was coding the Donald Trump Bumper Sticker Generator, I wanted to find a close match for the font used in the original graphic, and one way to do that is to look at a display of all the installed fonts. Since I was using Imagemagick to create these graphics, I needed to see which fonts were installed in a way that Imagemagick could use.

On a Linux system, when you install Imagemagick it includes some popular fonts like Avant Garde and Helvetica, but I ended up also installing a bunch of fonts I have on my office system, some of which came from an Adobe Font Folio CD I bought many eons ago. And in those fonts I eventually discovered the exact font used for the word “TRUMP” in our bumper sticker graphic: it’s “Akzidenz Grotesk.”

But I couldn’t find a script anywhere on the web that would just dump out a list of all the Imagemagick fonts, so I ended up writing one. (The screenshot at the top of this article shows a small section of the resulting web page.) And that’s the code I’m going to share today.

In order to run this PHP script you’ll need to have the Imagick extension installed; I won’t get into doing this because the installation method varies greatly depending on your server’s OS and the version of PHP you’re using. My advice is to Google “Installing Imagick for PHP” and find a method that suits your system.

The Font Display script is actually quite simple; so simple and short I haven’t included comments in this code. It’s just an HTML page with a small section of embedded PHP code to render the fonts when it’s loaded. The only really tricky part: to display the font samples I’m using an tag with a “data URI,” with the actual image data embedded directly inside the src attribute as a base 64-encoded string.

Also, because displaying all these fonts (I have a lot installed now!) can take a while, I used the set_time_limit() function to increase the amount of time to 300 seconds, so PHP doesn’t decide the script has been running too long and abort.

So without further ado… the code.

set_time_limit(300);
$fonts = \Imagick::queryFonts();
$text = 'Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack.';
foreach ($fonts as $font) {
	$image = new \Imagick();
	$draw = new \ImagickDraw();
	$draw->setFont($font);
	$draw->setFillColor('black');
	$draw->setFontSize(32);
	$draw->annotation(0, 32, $text);
	$image->newImage(1200, 48, 'none');
	$image->setImageFormat('png');
	$image->drawImage($draw);
	$imgData = base64_encode($image->getImageBlob());
	echo <<
{$font}