How can I do this with php_gd2.dll

[khovorka]

Hello,

I am hoping someone here can tell me how to do this
using the php_gd2.dll.

I have things working to create an image on the fly by
merging two or three images together.

I however don't want to have to save the image to a file
using imagepng($image,'filename.png');

I then need to use <img scr="filename.png"> inside of a table
to display the image.

I would like to be able to do the following:

<img src=$image> inside the table, but, this results in the
contents of the file being dumped to screen apparently.

Is there anyone who would know how to get this to work
with the file creation happening.

My reasoning is that I don't want to clutter up my directory
with a lot of one-time used images that others create, I
would like it to be more dynamic and again not depend on
a static file being created.

Thanks for any and all help to this issue.

Kim Hovorka
[e-mail]

[Weedpacket]

You could use
<img src='filename.php'>, where filename.php is a script that sends a "Content-Type: image/png" header, then generates the image and outputs it with imagepng().

Obviously, the request for filename.php is a separate request from the one that is getting the html page; you'll want some sort of way of passing the relevant information to filename.php so that it knows what images to merge. Sessions would be the cleanest way of doing this; the alternative would be a take like <img src='filename.php?var=value&foo=bar'> but that has significant disadvantages.

If you want, you could tell the server to pass requests for "filename.png" (or all resources with a file extension of ".png") on to PHP for processing; then the tag could read <img src="filename.png"> and it would still be dynamically generated.