Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 11, 2006 8:15 UTC (Wed) by MortFurd (guest, #9389)
In reply to: Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal) by rknop
Parent article: Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

GD is commonly used with PHP. PHP includes its own enhanced GD libraries since PHP 4.3 came out.

I know of some photo gallery web sites that use GD to generate the preview pictures and to generate the watermarks in the photos.

I've also seen GD used to dynamically generate the text on graphical buttons on web sites. It looks like a waste of effort, but if the site changes often and you need to add new menu entries that match the existing buttons then it seems to work out well. It also beats having to have the graphic designer who dreamed up the buttons remember how he did the originals and go back to him to have new ones made.
The buttons are usually cached on the web server, so the buttons aren't regenerated on every access. GD uses the freetype libraries to create a bitmap with the text, so that may be one morething to set it apart from the other libraries.