Reproduced with PHP5.3.1RC3 on Ubuntu LTS

I tend to blame the font.

I have to try them :)

It works with 5.2.6-1+lenny3 from Debian.

Broken as well in 5.3.1 (php.net) on Debian lenny

I don't think it's a font problem.
It draws text well when 
-the background tranparency is swiched off
-alphablending is set to true
-savealpha is set to false

Here is the modifed code:

<?php
header('Content-type: image/png');
$im = imagecreatetruecolor(400, 100);
$background = imagecolorallocatealpha($im, 60, 60, 60, 0)// no tranparency;
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
//imagealphablending($im, false); 
imagefilledrectangle($im, 0, 0, 399, 99, $background);
$text = 'Tesing ... ';
$font = './zeferinotwo.ttf';
imagettftext($im, 40, 0, 10, 40, $black, $font, $text);
//imagesavealpha($im, true);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>

Sorry, imagesavealpha has no effect on a result

Bug #50958 is a dupe of this, and has a couple more exemplars that might be useful for isolating the problem.

Tabe, can you take a look at this one too please? :)

I've noticed a similar issue with the good old fonts bundled in Windows XP (Arial, Verdana and specially Tahoma). Fonts look good in PHP/5.3.0 and overlap in PHP/5.3.2 (official VB6 thread-safe binaries).

Test script:

<?

$text_ansi = 'áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ';
$text_utf8 = utf8_encode('áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ');
$font = 'C:/Windows/fonts/tahoma.ttf';

$im = imagecreatetruecolor(400, 60);
$white = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
imagefilledrectangle($im, 0, 0, 399, 59, $white);
imagettftext($im, 15, 0, 10, 25, $black, $font, $text_ansi);
imagettftext($im, 15, 0, 10, 55, $black, $font, $text_utf8);

header('Content-Type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

?>

Rendering sample:

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/5959/php530.png
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/4013/php532.png

Seems that imagefttext is affected too, resulting image looks exactly the same. Does it use the same library?

There is already a solution for this problem in svn for both 5.2 and 5.3 branches 
(submited by tabe more than 5 weeks ago) - look for the file gdft.c . I suppose 
that this bug can be closed now.

Hi,

This is happening on PHP 5.3.3 on Linux ( CentOS 5 )

Some letters are overlapped...

Sorry for double post, but i forgot to include examples

Linux:
http://img836.imageshack.us/i/linuxr.png/

Windows:
http://img829.imageshack.us/i/windowsy.png/

Um, not sure what's the actual issue reported in this ticket.
Unfortunately, most of the links to results, fonts, etc. in this
report and in #50958 are unavailable in the meantime.

I can reproduce overlapping (respectively insufficient horizontal
letter distance) as reported by alvaro with PHP 5.3.2, but this
has been fixed as of PHP 5.4.0, if not earlier.

However, the original supplied test script gives indeed completely
broken results due to `imagealphablending($im, false);` even on
recent versions (PHP 5.6.11 and 7.0.0beta1) and apparently not
related to the font. See <http://imgur.com/UPowpes>. I'll try to
investigate.

The problem is that the background of the character glyphs must
not be drawn, and actually, this issue has already been fixed as
of GD 2.0.26[1], but that fix never made it to PHP's bundled
libgd. I'm going to port the fix.

[1] <https://github.com/libgd/libgd/blob/GD_2_0_26/src/gdft.c#L748-L749>