Mikko Koppanen has a quick post today showing how to use PHP and Imagick to create an image of text filled with another image layer behind it:

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

Mikko Koppanen has another quick new tutorial on using Imagick in your applications - this time it's about making buttons dynamically.

The button in this example is created after this tutorial http://xeonfx.com/tutorials/easy-button-tutorial/ (yes, I googled "easy button tutorial"). The code and the button it creates are both very simple but the effect looks really nice.

The example code creates a simple round button with a fill color and white text. Their examples show a red, green and blue buttons.

On Ozh's site, FrenchFragFactory.net, today, there's this handy little post dealing with the creation of gradients in PHP with the help of GD.

Here is a small PHP function I wrote that emulates a gradient fill of an image.

Disclaimer : there are probably existing alternatives or classes, maybe in PEAR. I didn't check. I wanted to write a function myself, as part of my GD training grounds.

The script is simple enough, and only uses four different variable values to make the patterns. There are a few examples of the end result in the form of a basic square output, but (as he mentions) it can be used just as easily in other situations. The source code is availible in either plain-text or in a .phps style file.