Vinu Thomas points out a nice looking PHP charting library on his blog today - pChart.

Looking for some good looking graphs without having to pay for a library or resort to Flash graphs? Try creating your own using pChart. pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. This project focuses on allowing developers to generate great looking graphs by increasing rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm.

It uses GD to create the graphs, so just about any PHP distribution out there will support it (if you're not sure, make a phpinfo() page to check out your setup). There's even some example graphs so you can get an idea of what some of the end results could be.

DevShed continues their series looking at the use of the graphics functionality in PHP, GD, with part three - a focus on more of the associated functions.

In this third article of the series I'll show you how to take advantage of a few more handy functions integrated with this library. These function will help you perform some basic drawing operations on a specified image stream.

They look at five new functions: imagearc, imagechar/imagecharup and imageellipse/imagefilledellipse with code examples for each.

In a new article today, DevShed takes a closer look at the most popular graphics library for PHP - GD:

The GD library comes bundled with both PHP 4 and PHP 5. While it is a popular library that has been around for a while, many web developers do not take full advantage of its capabilities. In this five-part series, we will take a close look at what the GB library can do for you, especially in the area of dynamically-generated graphics.

This first in the five part series introduces the library showing how to make images from scratch in two ways - the more "normal" method and an alternate method using streams (which they use to create a dynanmic GIF image).

In a new blog post today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows a method for doing a screen capture with just PHP and the GD functionality (an updated library, a DLL).

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being :D).

That's why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

He includes a few examples including grabbing a default screenshot, grabbing just the contents of a certain application (like Internet Explorer), and grabbing a fullscreened IE window too.

Jacek Artymiak published the second edition of his "Dynamic Bitmap Graphics with PHP and GD" tutorial over on DevGuide.net today focusing specifically on creating bitmaps on the fly.

The 39 page guide ($15 USD from Lulu.com) provides a wealth of knowledge about working with graphics in PHP including a detailed look at some of the more advanced functionality of GD. The book covers your first steps with GD and graphics, working with primitives, creating an image based on external data, and embedding them into an XHTML/HTML page of your choosing.

The page for the book on DevGuide.net itself even provides a great list of resources for those looking to get into graphics with PHP - with links to everything from the basic software (webservers, PHP, etc) out to the libraries you'll need and some other tutorials to help you even after you've worked through the book.

As spotlighted by the folks over on PHPClasses.org, there's a developer, László Zsidi, who has contributed several packages to the repository - including some that work to create 3D images with just the built-in functions PHP provides.

He has developed several pure PHP components that implement impressive 3D animated graphics, like a 3D objects rendering engine, emulate a waving flag or the reflex of an image near a lake. The generated frames are combined into a single animated GIF with another pure PHP component also written by László. All these components were nominated to the PHP Programming Innovation Award for the evident creativity, demonstrating that PHP can be used for non-trivial software applications.

Some of the libraries in the listing include:

• Animated GIF into images
• Image Flag Effect
• Text 3D
• FXLake effect
• Convex 3D

Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.

While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.

My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal

He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks pointing out an extension for PHP that allows it to use the Cairo graphics library.

Cairo is the "next generation" vector graphics library for Linux and very cool to have it available in PHP. Also cool about the extension was created using PEAR::CodeGen_PECL, which Hartmut describes here: look Mum - no C! (well almost).

Harry also asks if, with the rise of new technologies like this, if it's time to make the move to deprecate GD from normal PHP use - at the same time, removing another hurdle in PHP's path towards being thread safe.

PHPit.net has posted part one of a new series of tutorials focusing on working with the GD graphics library inside of PHP.

In this new article series you will learn about PHP's inbuilt image functions. In the first part you will see how to open images, display or save them, and how to write a simple image converter.

They start with a look at reading images in to start working with, in both GIF and JPEG formats. To make things simpler for life down the road, they opt to create their own simple "open_image" function that adapts to whatever kind of file it's given and returns an image resource.

Then it's over to the output - displaying and saving the images out to a local drive. Finally, they demonstrate how to convert images from one file type to another (as uploaded via a HTML form).

One of the best moves that the PHP language developers could have made was to bring the GD library code "into the fold" and integrate it with recent PHP installations. This makes it easy to manipulate images and customize things on the fly. Another thing it allows is the generation of thumbnails for your site, either dynamically or in something like a cron job. Want to know how? Well, read up here.

In this article from Icant.co.uk, they step you through the creation of these smaller, lighter versions of your images with lots of code and explainations. Topics covered include:

• The logic of batch processing thumbnails
• The PHP functions to use
• The main thumbnail generation function

They also include instructions on how to check your installation for GD support and how to load it if it's not already there (module support).