Websites that display user-entered text.

June 10, 2006 4:42 PM

Would like to see examples of web applications that display user-entered text in a chosen font. In other words, I choose a font from a menu, enter text in a field, click submit...my text is displayed in the font I chose.
posted by davebush to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Like this?
posted by matthewr at 4:49 PM on June 10, 2006

The Adobe site lets you preview its font collections with text of your choosing. Here's an example.
posted by beerbajay at 5:05 PM on June 10, 2006

There's this, too.
posted by Daddio at 5:14 PM on June 10, 2006

Veer has flont but you need to be logged in to use it, and I'm pretty sure it's Flash.
posted by Brainy at 6:50 PM on June 10, 2006

Are you interested in how you might produce an image of some text on the server? If so then this might be what you're looking for.

I wrote an example program in Python using cairo, then discovered to my chagrin that I don't have 'cairo' on my external web server, so I can't make a "live demo" as it were.

I'll put the source code for it online anyway. It's written as a plain old CGI script, nothing fancy: fontdemo.py
posted by jepler at 7:42 PM on June 10, 2006

You could probably do something like this with SIFR.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:16 AM on June 11, 2006

If you're going to use a CGI script to call a command line program to render the type (as in the case in the article I'm linking) be VERY VERY careful about the input. This page is a good resource for getting in the mindset of writing secure cgi scripts: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Perl/Writing-Secure-CGI-scripts/
posted by crypticgeek at 6:54 PM on June 11, 2006