At some point or other, pretty much every web developer has wondered if there's an easy way to create an image from a text variable in PHP. There are many potential uses for this, the simplest of which being aesthetics. A heading rendered as a JPEG or GIF can make use of anti-aliasing for the edges of the text, so it will look much smoother and more refined, as opposed to a basic text/HTML heading which can be somewhat crispy.

Here's a link to a PHP class that will allow you to do this image rendering easily.