There are several ways to create images or graphics with PHP. First there
are some well known extensions, like ext/GD, or perhaps ext/ming everybody
immediately remembers, when it comes to graphics generation. But there are
several structural differences not in between the avaliable libraries, but
also between the image formats you can create. This article series will give
you some insight on the formats and libraries, and then shows how an
abstraction layer could be build. This second part describes the generation
of shapes and the basic drawing context.