Why would you convert text to image? Well, the first thing that comes into my mind when I hear this is “to avoid spam,” since it’s almost impossible to automatically gather email addresses displayed as images, while those that get displayed as plain text information will soon land into the spammers’ list of vitims. Today, the time has come for a quick look at PHP Text to Image, an image handling class that does exactly what its name says…
… or, as the official mumbo-jumbo says – “This script is a means to convert a string of text into an image. This has some simple uses such as displaying text such as email address that cannot be programmatically found. This can help to reduce the possibility of your email address being picked up by web crawlers and used for junk mail.”
PHP Text to Image is freely available, but only seems to work with Latin characters. The most unfortunate part of it all is that this script doesn’t seem to be maintained properly, and a lot of problems gathered in time, for example the fact that you get a really ugly image, with aliased fonts, not to mention the fact that similar solutions offer more flexibility. On the other hand, the PHP code is available on the page I mentioned above, so you can improve PHP Text to Image by yourself, if you got the time and skills required. After all, that’s why I bothered to mention this piece of code here, so… good luck, folks – you will probably need it… 😉
