Hey hhm thanks for posting this code. It's just the inspiration I've been looking for.. in Perl as well.

You're welcome!

Pretty slick, but I wonder if there's a way to do it without jpegs. I would think that using fonts, vector markup, or css would be lighter and quicker. Any thoughts?

It's true that you could do it without jpegs, but using jpegs produce the most compatibility, as it'll work within the older IE and Netscape Browsers. Using fonts is an iffy affair, as across systems/browsers there'll be differences in formatting and available fonts to choose.

Yes, by using a gif. (Gif is better here as the final image has few colours and sharp contrasting colours beside each other.)

And yes it could be done with Gimp/html/css/MS Paint, whatever you know.

Why not use html tables and 1 pixel images of various heights/widths?

This sort of knack for "clever, yet simple" pervades his code.

http://search.cpan.org/~mjd/

Indeed -- if I hadn't seen 'plover.com' in the URL I would not have bothered to read it. But MJD is one of those people who is pretty much always worth reading.

His book "Higher Order Perl" is awesome. And Memoize is so neat that I go around looking for places to use it.