CFIMAGE Part 1

I was looking through the Coldfusion docs today, specifically at the cfimage tags and all the goodness that they bring to CF. I'm continually amazed at the level of integration that CF8 has with other Adobe products, specifically in the area of PDF's and Images.

So what exactly is the deal with cfimage anyway? and what can I do with it? were the questions that I thought needed answering. I posted earlier about how to create a captcha image using the image tag but now I decided it would be good to get back to basics, start at the beginning and go from there.

So lets start at the beginning.

How do we create an image?

Well as it turns out it's dead easy.

Ok so that's useful we have a black 100x100 square...so what now.

Writing Text to an Image

We write text to an image using the ImageDrawText function which takes a few parameters. ImageDrawText(name, str, x, y, attributeCollection). Our previous code gets extended a bit.

So now we set the drawing color to be white, what better color to show against black eh?

And then we create a structure to hold the text style, set anti aliasing on or our text gets pretty pixelated. We then call the ImageDrawText function followed by the cfimage with the "WriteToBrowser" action and voila we have a lovely black square with the words Hello World as seen below.

Note: We can also use the ImageNew function to read an existing image or use the cfimage tag to do the same thing and use the optional name attribute to save it to a variable.

Happy Coding...