zem_ir (formerly zem_image_replace) replaces text with a PNG image rendered using a TrueType font, and uses CSS to place the image on the page in such a way that the text is still accessible to text-only browsers. It’s similar, in some respects, to SIFR, except that zem_ir uses PNG and CSS where SIFR uses Flash and Javascript.

Because it integrates with Textpattern, zem_ir can be safely used to automatically turn any text into an image – not just a static heading, but article headlines, dates, even excerpts and entire articles (not that we’d recommend that). All images are cached to save bandwidth and minimize server load. In most cases the title images created by zem_ir are very small, often less than 1kb each.

Here’s an example of it in action:

Download the current version: zem_ir-0.5.txt
Online docs: zem_ir documentation
License: GPL.

NB – the plugin name changed with version 0.5. Users upgrading from a previous version will need to manually disable or uninstall zem_image_replace before activating the new version.

Changes:

Version 0.5:

Many additions and improvements, including:

• zem_ir_set tag for pre-defining default parameters
• Multiple configuration groups
• Supports 5 different CSS replacement methods
• Accurate text rotation
• padding tag to fix clipping errors
• Word wrapping
• Options for capitalizing and stripping text before rendering
• Safer default parameters