TextImage

I have checked in version 0.22 of the TextImage plugin for WordPress. WordPress 2.7.1 shipped with a broken version of the PHP function htmlspecialchars_decode(). This function, which had obviously never been tested before the release, causes any plugin that calls htmlspecialchars_decode() in PHP 4 to fail. PHP 5 has its own implementation of htmlspecialchars_decode(), and PHP 5 users are unaffected by this bug.

TextImage 0.22 has a workaround for this bug. If running on PHP 4, TextImage 0.22 will call its own implementation of htmlspecialchars_decode(). On PHP 5, the PHP library version will be used.  

In addition, you can now specify the font directory from the configuration page.

What are the next things you would like in TextImage? in t2img.com?

Here are some options (most of these just apply to t2img.com):

• transparency
• more fonts
• a color picker
• different image types (gif, jpeg)

Leave a comment and let me know.

I have checked TextImage 0.2 into wordpress.org svn. It is available now at wordpress.org.

Warning: if you are using the old version, 0.2 breaks the old behavior of converting every post into an image. Now you have to enclose anything you want converted between <textimage> and </textimage> tags.

I think this is much more useful, but please let me know if you’d like the old behavior available as an option.

I have also launched t2img.com as a free web service so people can create TextImages without installing WordPress and a plugin. 

TextImage 0.2 for Wordpress is ready for release, as soon as I write some updated documentation.

It uses the new to let you turn arbitrary blocks of text into images.

You could use it to hide specific from automated filters or robots, while keeping the rest of your post visible to search engines.

This is the first post with the new and extremely useful

Well, OK, it is still pretty basic. The only change is that everything between <textimage> and </textimage> gets turned into an image. It still uses the settings from the plugin options page, so all your images will look alike. Here’s another example:

These may change and there may be others. Please suggest your favorites.

Basic as it is, in my opinion this change makes the Textimage plugin far more potentially useful.

Note: if you’re editing your posts with the online Wordpress editor, you need to use the Code tab to insert the tags. If you see the tags like this:

<textimage>This is supposed to be an image but isn’t</textimage>

you have created your tags on the Visual tab. Go back and edit on the Code tab. The changes you need to make will be obvious.

Many thanks to David Tames for the comment that suggested this.

TextImage plugin for WordPress

The TextImage plugin for WordPress displays your post text as a PNG image instead of sending it to the browser as normal HTML. You can specify the text color, background color, font, font size, and image width you want to use.Why would you want to do this? Text rendered as an image can’t be read by most robots and filters. TextImage can help ensure that your posts won’t be found by search engines and the like. If you want your posts to have the widest audience possible, TextImage probably isn’t for you. If you want to maintain a weblog for a private community and keep a low profile, TextImage might help.The idea for the TextImage plugin came to me when I read about the Great Firewall of China. This Internet censorship regime uses automated filtering to accomplish most of its dirty work. Something like TextImage might help get real information past this kind of robotic tyranny, though of course it will be useless against human censors.

Requirements

TextImage was written and tested using WordPress 2.1. I have not tested it with other versions.TextImage requires the gd module for PHP. If phpinfo() has a section for the gd module, you’re probably OK. On my CentOS 4.3 server, I used the command yum install php-gd to get the correct module installed. TextImage tries to detect whether gd is installed, and if it isn’t, TextImage won’t try to change the way WordPress displays your posts.TextImage also needs TrueType fonts. These are files with the extension .ttf. There are probably hundreds of them on your Windows machine under /windows/fonts. There are also websites that sell TrueType fonts, or let you download them for free.If your Linux server has a graphical interface installed, it probably also has some TrueType fonts. TextImage looks for them under /usr/shared/fonts. If your fonts aren’t there you will need to change the font directory on the TextImage configuration page. See Options, below.

Installation

The TextImage plugin for WordPress consists of two files. All of the WordPress-specific code is in textimage_wp.php. The creation of the actual image with word-wrapped text is done in wrapped_text_image.php. Just copy both files to the wp-content/plugins directory, then enable the TextImage plugin on the Plugins admin panel. All your posts will henceforth appear as images. Nothing is changed permanently: deactivate the plugin and they’ll reappear as normal.

Options

TextImage installs its options page under the Options tab, as you might expect. The options you can specify are:

Limitations

TextImage does not render HTML: it can’t apply multiple fonts, bolding and italics (unless everything is bold or italic), or other fancy formatting to your post. You get one font in one size and color. You can, however, force line breaks by using carriage returns.TextImage strips html tags from your post before it renders the image. It does not, however, modify the actual post. If you disable TextImage, all your HTML will work as before. TextImage renders only posts as images. Titles, comments, and all other content are still rendered as regular HTML. If there is demand I might consider changing this. Tables and other heavily formatted text won’t render correctly in TextImage.

This site runs a modified version of TextImage. One crucial line of code is different:

$the_text = “<img src=\”$cache_url$basename\”>”;

is replaced with:

$the_text = $the_text . “<img src=\”$cache_url$basename\”>”;

That makes this site display both the HTML version of the post and the resulting image.

If demand warrants I may later add a feature to TextImage to let you designate which posts should be displayed as images and which should not.

This is the home of the TextImage plugin for WordPress. You can download it here: TextImage 0.11