The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.

I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.

This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.

Today, I'll give a little info on how to achieve the process of creating a thumbnail using PHP, GD and the text from a text file. It is really pretty simple, so lets get started.

The trick behind the translation is in reading in the contents of the (plain) text file and pushing it into a string value of a newly created GD-generated image. He includes the code to make using it in your own app simple (a cut and paste version) - his method FileToThumb.

• Image creation with PHP - Image Tools
• Image creation with PHP - Text rendering
• Image creation with PHP - Integrating bitmaps
• Image creation with PHP - Gradient rendering
• Image creation with PHP - A first shape
• Image creation with PHP - Formats & Libraries

Each of them can be read separately, but they're all part of a series and make more sense when read together.

Consider you have a set of data that is changing dynamically for each page request and you need to cache that data the fastest way possible. You can't cache dynamic and unpredictable data as a whole, can you? Hence, we would put each data entry into cache separately to be able to fetch it separately and dynamically. But this means bombing your cache infrastructure with with requests.

They break it up into a few different topics - caching text elements on the page, two-tiered caching (grouping cached items), incremental caching and cache versioning. They don't share an example of their code unfortunately, but they do mention something about a possible contribution to the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework.

All right, now that you know how to include basic blocks of text into a simple PDF file, in addition to incorporating some images, the question that comes up here is: what's the next step to take? Well, in this fourth part of the series I'm going to show you how to draw a few basic shapes, once a PDF document has been opened, like empty and filled rectangles, which can be useful if you want to decorate the document with these kinds of forms.

The tutorial walks you through the creation of another sample PDF file (with text and an image) and shows the process for adding rectangles via the rect() function call on their PDFLib class.

At this point, you hopefully recall how to use the previous methods to display multiple lines of text in a concrete PDF file, so it's time to learn a few more method bundled with the library. As you'll see in the next few lines, these methods can be quite helpful for performing other tasks, like including images and blocks of texts into the PDF file in question.

They list out the complete source so far to provide a refresher before starting, then move on to the new functionality - adding a basic image and positioning it and creating and adding a text field to your sample PDF.

In this second part of the series I'll provide you with some examples that illustrate how to build PDF files that contain multiple lines of text; remember, in the preceding article I worked only with single-line strings. Additionally, I'll teach you how to position these texts on a given PDF page.

The tutorial walks you through a quick review of making a PDF file from scratch before moving on to the new stuff - creating a PDF with multiple lines of text in it and an example of positioning the text with the set_text_pos function in PHP.

Today's example was requested by a user called Devo. This example illustrates making an animated GIF image by creating the frames from scratch. It's been so long since I've really drawn anything so I decided to use text as the base for this animation.

His example ends up as a string ("Hello World") that's animated to show one more letter at a time as each frame loads.

I created my own test runner to run tests inside Vim, I can't remember how long ago. Must be a year or two. I never shared it with the world. It was too primitive for anyone else to use. Then, recently, I decided to try re-implementing it in a more serious way.

The "more serious way" meant using Vim script to its full potential, including the ability to work with objects and already has its own testing framework. He includes a screenshot but no download just yet. It looks promising and makes running tests as simple as hitting F11 and watching it go.