Question

I’m writing a fastcgi app for my website in C.

How do I use GD to generate a CAPTCHA image?

I searched for some stuff on google in vain (still search is going on), but it would be nice if someone could give me the basic idea about the procedure.

For random numbers, I will use nanoseconds as seed (or use that itself).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Look at the void gdImageStringUp(gdImagePtr im, gdFontPtr font, int x, int y, unsigned char *s, int color) (FUNCTION) code example (you can pretty much copy-paste it)..

  #include "gd.h"
  #include "gdfontl.h"
  #include <string.h>

  /*... inside a function ...*/
  gdImagePtr im;
  int black;
  int white;
  /* String to draw. */
  char *s = "Hello.";
  im = gdImageCreate(100, 100);
  /* Background color (first allocated) */
  black = gdImageColorAllocate(im, 0, 0, 0);
  /* Allocate the color white (red, green and blue all maximum). */
  white = gdImageColorAllocate(im, 255, 255, 255);
  /* Draw a centered string going upwards. Axes are reversed,
  and Y axis is decreasing as the string is drawn. */
  gdImageStringUp(im, gdFontGetLarge(),
  im->w / 2 - gdFontGetLarge()->h / 2,
  im->h / 2 + (strlen(s) * gdFontGetLarge()->w / 2), s, white);
  /* ... Do something with the image, such as
  saving it to a file... */
  /* Destroy it */
  gdImageDestroy(im);

http://www.libgd.org/Font

The noise is done with random pixels/lines/etc, which is trivial:

  /*... inside a function ...*/
  gdImagePtr im;
  int black;
  int white;
  im = gdImageCreate(100, 100);
  /* Background color (first allocated) */
  black = gdImageColorAllocate(im, 0, 0, 0);
  /* Allocate the color white (red, green and blue all maximum). */
  white = gdImageColorAllocate(im, 255, 255, 255);
  /* Set a pixel near the center. */
  gdImageSetPixel(im, 50, 50, white);
  /* ... Do something with the image, such as
  saving it to a file... */
  /* Destroy it */
  gdImageDestroy(im);

http://www.libgd.org/Drawing

LibGD has like a zillion examples on their website.