Elizabeth Smith has posted about the latest release of a PHP extension she's been working hard on - the Cairo 2D graphics extension.

The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I've been working on is finally out. Cairo is a 2D graphics library written in C with support for multiple output devices. The extension provides an Object Oriented API, but also includes procedural methods. This is similar to PHP's date and mysqli extensions

The extension (for PHP 5.2.x and 5.3.x versions) requires the CairoGraphics library to work but it allows you to create some great graphics and output them in a number of ways (like PDF, SVG and PostScript). The extension is still in the alpha stages because the API isn't quite complete, but you can still download this version if you'd like to give it a shot.