(recommended) Uses alpha-blending to anti-alias text against any background. Supported by most browsers, with the unfortunate exception of IE versions prior to IE 7.
Uses 1 level of transparency, so anti-aliasing against a specific color must be built into the image.
Does not support transparency. Background color is drawn with text.
Enter text to render: Fonts in an HTML document are normally limited to those on a client's system. There are very few fonts web designers can rely on to be available by default. Although the web is very similar to traditional text content formats, the lack of control over the typeset can be a limitation. Rendering text on the server can free the web designer from this limitation, with certain drawbacks. On browsers (such as IE <= 7) which do not support embedded data (RFCs 2397), server-rendering will be inefficient when used with large blocks of text. Try it out: