Like cornershop and my discovery of Google's corner generator roflbot has preceded my "discovery" of Yahoo!'s neat text generator.

Yahoo! recently redesigned a lot of pages to have spiffy transparent PNG overlays and nice PNG-based typography. For example, check out the lead photo and headline on the Yahoo! Sports page.

It turns out the pretty text is rendered on the fly. All the images in this post are generated by Yahoo's server, not hosted by me. Here's how it works:

<img src="http://l.yimg.com/img.sports.yahoo.com/static/bir/headline?txt=Fun!">

<img src="http://l.yimg.com/img.sports.yahoo.com/static/bir/headline?txt=with+the">

<img src="http://l.yimg.com/img.sports.yahoo.com/static/bir/headline?txt=DYNAMICAL+TEXT">







It has some weird stuff. It handles some Unicode characters:

<img src="http://l.yimg.com/img.sports.yahoo.com/static/bir/headline?txt=n%C3%A4men">



But it treats " weird:

<img src="http://l.yimg.com/img.sports.yahoo.com/static/bir/headline?txt=%22foo%22">



It also ignores any text between < and >.

It also scales the text to fit in at most 490 horizontal pixels, but not exactly; the size jumps down at certain steps.









The font is Gotham Bold.

What other fun stuff does Yahoo's text generator do? If you find out, let me know.