Chapter 13. Creating Graphics on the Fly

Throughout this book we have seen many examples of CGI scripts generating dynamic output. However, in almost all cases, the output has been HTML. Certainly this is the most common format your scripts will generate. However, CGI scripts can actually generate any type of format, and in this chapter we will look at how we can dynamically generate images.

Generating images dynamically has many uses. One of the most common is to generate graphs. If you have a data source that is continually changing, such as the results of an online survey, a CGI script can generate a graph that presents a visual snapshot of this data.