In yet another "security via randomly generated images" kind of article, DevShed has posted their latest - Security Images with PHP and ImageMagick.

Though similar to previous articles, this one is a little bit different - it trades off using the GD functionality for some external software called here is to have something that appeals more to the sysadmins (than recompiling PHP to add GD). With the external ImageMagick software, making these images is just about as easy as with GD.

They step you through the creation of an application with five scripts and a true-type font file (for the text in the image). Given arrays of characters, the script randomly chooses the letters, passes them out to the ImageMagick script, and returns an image stored in the /tmp directory of your choosing. From there, it's a simple matter of pushing out the image with the correct Content-Type headers...