PHP is not limited to creating just HTML output. It can also be
used to create and manipulate image files in a variety of different
image formats, including gif, png, jpg, wbmp, and xpm. Even more
convenient, php can output image streams directly to a browser. You
will need to compile PHP with the GD library of image functions for
this to work. GD and PHP may also require other libraries, depending
on which image formats you want to work with. GD stopped supporting
Gif images in version 1.6.
Example 16-1. PNG creation with PHP
<?php
Header("Content-type: image/png");
$string=implode($argv," ");
$im = imageCreateFromPng("images/button1.png");
$orange = ImageColorAllocate($im, 220, 210, 60);
$px = (imagesx($im)-7.5*strlen($string))/2;
ImageString($im,3,$px,9,$string,$orange);
ImagePng($im);
ImageDestroy($im);
?>
|
|
This example would be called from a page with a tag like: <img
src="button.php?text"> The above button.php script
then takes this "text" string an overlays it on top of a
base image which in this case is "images/button1.png"
and outputs the resulting image. This is a very convenient way to
avoid having to draw new button images every time you want to
change the text of a button. With this method they are
dynamically generated.
