The latest Drupal module I'm loving is Signwriter, contributed to the community by the good folks at Agileware and what a great module it is . It is a solution to a problem most people simply put up with and does exactly what I wrote above, dynamically generates images from custom fonts, overcoming one of the biggest limitations of the web - you can only use common fonts visitors have installed.

The initial release for Drupal 6 had a small bug I reported here which made it impossible to use the module at all, but after overcoming that problem using the advice provided I simple cannot imagine ever having lived without Signwriter.

A good resource for free fonts to use with this is Free Premium Fonts. On their website you can not only browse their large library of free fonts, it is also possible to test how any font will look using the text of your choosing, saving you the need to download and test them individually.

One thing I've found with Signwriter is that if you don't specify a background colour your font will look terrible, so it's best to choose the same as your background or one that is close to it.

Signwriter has the flexibility to specify a maximum width of the image to be generated and if that width is reached the font size is reduced to fit the text automatically. Actually, I think they simply resize the image to match the width specified which is a much better way to do it. It is also supposed to support multi-line images, but I haven't been able to get that working.

This module is getting added to the list of modules I love. I'll have to make a list of modules I commonly use...