Automatic text-graphics

I'm looking for a tool that can convert text strings to graphics files

[Paul_Yeoman]

Hi all,

I'm building a small e-commerce website where I would like the names of products and their categories to be rendered in a specific font.

This font is uncommon and most users won't have it. I've discovered that it's not possible to 'push' a font to a user, and the font is non-embeddable.

The product information is stored in a mySQL database. There are a large number of products and this is expected to grow.

So I'm now hoping to find a program that can take text strings as input, and create an image file (preferably png) with a standard height, in the font and colour of my choosing. Hopefully there's one that could do this as a batch job so I can just feed it a text file or something similar.

Does anyone know of such a program?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[benihana]

you got php with that mysql?

if so, [uk2.php.net...]

[Paul_Yeoman]

Thanks benihaha,

Yes I do have PHP, and thanks to your suggestion I now have a completely automated way of doing this (after a couple of days getting up to speed).

I wrote a script so that now whenever I change items in the DB I can regenerate all the headers with a couple of clicks, passing a few parameters. Hundreds of images in 2 or 3 seconds!

Thanks again,

Paul