Spent the better part of the morning battling PHP/GD. I needed to overlay text on an image, something I can recall doing in the past without issue. Not this morning though. Everytime the code got to ‘imagettftext’ it would result in a WSOD. After much troubleshooting and Google’ng I found this mention in the PHP bug db which then pointed to the root of the cause: The macports ‘freetype’ lib. The solution for fixing that is here.

hope this helps others