This is a tiny plugin that, in combination with a separate server-side script, dynamically replaces the text of an element with an image, generated using fonts you specify. This allows you to use beautiful text in headings without having to manually produce images in Photoshop, GIMP, or similar.

PIR isn't *quite* as full-featured as a kitchen-sink solution like SIFR, but you'll never miss the few features it lacks. PIR makes it easy for you by taking the size, color, and background from your CSS and automatically generating an appropriate image. It produces full 32-bit PNGs, and handles transparency both in backgrounds and in text colors right out of the box (try it with the rgba syntax supported by Safari 3 or Firefox 3.1!). It can even do dynamic word-wrapping if you tell it to.

PIR is *extremely* light-weight (only about 1200 bytes over the wire when minified, and about 500 bytes after gzipping, which your server should do automatically), doesn't require your user to have any plugins (like Flash) installed, and doesn't require *you* to have any sort of proprietary software. You just put the script on your server, upload the fonts you want to use, and you're done with setup.

PIR is also completely accessible. If your user has javascript turned off, they still see the plain text, in the size and color you desire. If they have images turned off, they'll see the alt-text from the images instead, producing the same result. Screenreaders can read text transformed by PIR without a hitch.

A php script (from which the plugin gets its name) to generate the images is included, but any server-side script that can generate images that can be used as long as it can consume the GET arguments appropriately.

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