Description:
------------
The description of the 'text' parameter in imagettftext wrongly describes decimal numeric character entities as "UTF-8 character sequences", whereas the function actually accepts BOTH of UTF-8 character sequences, and decimal numeric character entities.

http://uk2.php.net/imagettftext
"
text
    The text string.

    May include any UTF-8 character sequences (of the form: {) to access characters in a font beyond the first 255
"

{ is not a UTF-8 character sequence, it is a decimal numeric character reference as per section 5.3.1 of HTML 4.0.1.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.3.1

This has nothing to do with the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode characters; the reference is entirely ASCII, and the character it refers to is the code point in the Unicode character set - not the corresponding UTF-8 encoding of that character.

Also the example value "123" given is not past the first 255 characters in the font.

imagettftext passes the string to GD, which expects a UTF-8 encoded string according to its documentation. So, any character above 127 will be a malformed UTF-8 string.

See: http://www.boutell.com/gd/manual2.0.33.html#gdImageStringFT
"
The null-terminated string argument is considered to be encoded via the UTF_8 standard; also, HTML entities are supported, including decimal, hexadecimal, and named entities (2.0.26).
"

Given characters in the 128-255 range, which are not valid UTF-8 single byte characters, it appears to fall back to using them as a single-byte character, but this is not documented.

Suggest the description be changed to something like:

"
text
    The text string, encoded in UTF-8.

    May include decimal numeric character references (of the form: €) to access characters in a font beyond position 127.
"

(The value 8364 is the Euro symbol)