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Nevermore be shackled by the appearance of jagged fonts. Release the bonds of using the same tired web typefaces over and over again. Save yourself immeasurable hours of creating individual text images for titles. The time has come to bathe in the omnipotence of dynamically generated text images. By harnessing the power of PHP and the commonly built-in GD Library, you too can become a god among men.

This super-lightweight script allows you to render any text into any TrueType font that is then displayed as an image on your web page. It includes the option to cache images to reduce server load.

This script requires PHP 4.3 or greater and the PHP GD Library installed on your server (very common library).

1. To test if your server meets the requirements, upload the file server_test.php to any directory and run it from your browser. The script will let you know if your server is properly configured.

2. Open font.php with a text editor to configure the default script variables.

   Setting $cache to true is recommended. If you enable caching, you must list a directory in $cache_path.

3. The image-text that the script outputs can be controlled using any combination of the following three methods:

   • Default values (as set in font.php)
   • font_style.php values
   • $_GET values set when calling the script

   Each method overrides the one before it.

4. There are quite a few variables you can use to make your image-text look exactly how you would like it to. The variables are all explained in the font_style.php file.

   $vadj and $hadj variables require a little further explanation. GDFont Renderer script makes a really good guess at the final outcome of what your fonts will look like and how much of them it needs to display. However, on certain fonts, it will add too much space below the last line of text - or sometimes cut-off the last letter. These two adjustment variables allow you to compensate for the graphical mix-ups. They can be negative or positive numbers (in pixels)

5. Upload all files to your server. Please keep the verdana.tt file around, as it is the default font used when administering the script.

6. Any fonts you plan on using must be uploaded to the $font_path as declared in font.php. This script only works with .ttf TrueType Fonts. Please note, that while most FTP clients determine this automatically, all font files need to be uploaded in Binary mode.

7. Now, to turn any text into a rendered font, insert the following line of code in your HTML code, in-lieu of "Your Text".

   <img src="font.php?text=Your Text Here&style=title" />
   

   Obviously "Your Text Here" is replaced with your text and "Title" is replaced with the name of the appropriate style as listed in your font_style.php file.

   You can also use an inline method by including any of the variables listed in font_style.php.

   <img src="font.php?text=Hello World&font=arial&size=15&color=#666699" />
   

   Furthermore, you can use a combination of both font_style.php and inline methods. Any Inline variable called will override the font_style.php variables.

   <img src="font.php?text=Hello World&style=title&font=visitor&padding=30&alignment=right" />
   

   The only required variables in all of these methods is $text.

8. The script includes an easy method to clear the image cache (which may be useful depending on how often you render text). All you need to do is access font.php directly without any variables. Bam, cache cleared.

   This feature can also be run as a Cron Job. The following Cron Job is a sample and will clear your cache every 2 weeks.

   0 3 14 * 0 /usr/local/bin/php public_html/font.php
   

   You will need to alter the PHP location and root location of your font.php to match your server.

If you have a working knowledge of PHP, the possibilities to dynamically generate text and styles are endless. Since you can cache any image created, this script can implemented anywhere and everywhere without bogging down your server load or download times.

The only drawback to this system is that outputted text is no longer selectable. However, if you make sure to include detailed alt tags within all your images, the text will be accessible on all browsers and can be registered by search engines.

Tidbits of this script were blatantly stolen from Stewart Rosenberger's Dynamic Text Replacement script.

Article was last edited on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 @ 9:24 AM

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