Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel has an amazing library of free commercial-use fonts. All of the @font-face kits that are available in my Premium themes come from Font Squirrel. You can download fonts to use in desktop publishing or you can grab some @font-face kits to use on your Web site. There is even a handy, simple to use tool for converting standard fonts into @font-face kits for embedding on your Web site.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Google Font API

I wrote about this one already so just check out that article.

TypeKit

TypeKit is a subscription-based service that allows you to link to fonts from many different type foundries. Subscription costs range from free to $99.99 per year. A free account allows for 25,000 pageviews a month and a limit of 2 fonts throughout you site. It is a great way to test out the service to see if it is right for you.
https://typekit.com/

WebFont Loader

This one is very similar to the Google Font API but it offers a wider range of resources of available fonts. You can use Google Fonts, TypeKit, Ascender or custom fonts.
http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.html

sIFR

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is an open source piece of JavaScript that allows you to replace text elements on your Web site with Flash embedded equivalents. It is a bit more complicated to implement but there are many sites that use it and the results are quite nice.
http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3/

typeface.js

typeface.js was developed by David Chester as an alternative to using Flash to embed fonts on your site. Using typeface.js is pretty straightforward, since all it takes is the core JavaScript file and then a font. You can even convert your own fonts.
http://typeface.neocracy.org/

FLIR

FLIR (FaceLift Image Replacement) is another alternative to sIFR. It was created by Cory Mawhorter and uses JavaScript and PHP to dynamically create images of the text elements that you wish to use specific fonts on. Implementing it requires only a few lines of code and you are up and running.
http://facelift.mawhorter.net/

Cufón

Cufón works with a rendering engine built in JavaScript and a font generator that uses FontForge to convert fonts to a proprietary format.
http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/

You can check to see if the GD library available on your server by placing the code:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

into a test.php file and uploading it to your site’s main directory. Open the file online and look to see if GD Support is Enabled. If it is, you are good to go.

The following code will dynamically create a PNG file from a text string.

<?php
header("Content-type: image/png");
 
$string = "This is my test string.";
 
$font  = 2;
$width  = imagefontwidth($font) * strlen($string);
$height = imagefontheight($font);
 
$image = imagecreatetruecolor ($width,$height);
$white = imagecolorallocate ($image,255,255,255);
$black = imagecolorallocate ($image,0,0,0);
imagefill($image,0,0,$white);
 
imagestring ($image,$font,0,0,$string,$black);
 
imagepng ($image);
imagedestroy($image);
?>

The above code must be included in its own file, it cannot be added to an existing PHP file with other functions. To access this image from another file just include it as the source in an image tag.

Test out turning text into an image by typing in something below.