Display custom text & font

[three]

Has anyone created something similar to this: http://www.eyewire.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/TypeViewer

Our needs would be limited to 10 fonts, but it would need to display the custom text the user types in a form field as the font they choose. I'm assuming this is a very complex difficult thing - am I correct? Or is there a fairly standard way to create something like this?

thanks.

[dank]

I can't imagine it would be easy to do... The fonts would need to be stored on the server and used to build the specified font/text into a graphic, which is then presented back to the user. I would guess it is no less trivial with 10 fonts than with 8,000.

Dan

[palmech13]

If you don't mind have just a few set sizes, you could pull an ugly but easy-to-implement hack of taking pictures of each letter. Then it's an easy script to parse the user's input text and output each letter as a picture.

ie: "Hello" turns into:
[coolFont12H.gif][coolFont12e.gif][coolFont12l.gif][coolFont12l.gif][coolFont12o.gif]

Not nearly as elegant, but works with a limited set of fonts and font sizes.

Of course, if you don't mind the user downloading the font, I think you can use CSS. But if you're trying to sell the font, it does defeat the purpose. ;)

Chris