Cc me if possible.  Thanks.

Big Picture:

A web-site wants to be able to give people a download-able, 
print-able, frame-able, feel-good "Certificate" with their name on it 
after nominating their "hero".  (A teacher or fireman or whatever.)

And maybe donating money to the Red Cross or something, but that part 
isn't locked in yet.

(I'm getting the design concept info second-hand here, okay?...)

There's no huge corporate sponsor or anything, it's just this guy 
wants to do this, you know?

Anyway, I know the stock answer is "fdf" -- PDF with form data 
inside.  'Cuz that's the answer I've written many a time here :-)

But my shallow research says PDF and fdf cost money for commercial 
use, and this may or may not turn out to be non-commercial use 
depending on how picky their lawyers were when they wrote the 
license, and we don't want that banner thingie in there in the 
background or whatever seems to be required for non-commercial use 
anyway.  We want this to be frame-able so they can hang it on the 
wall.

Or am I mis-reading that part about the banner embedded in an fdf? 
Or was that only PDF, and fdf rules are entirely different? I'm so 
confused!

Also, PDF/fdf looks pretty tricky, and I already sorta know how to do 
GD more or less, so I'm thinking I could just get a 300-dpi TIFF file 
or even a JPEG and use GD instead...

But can GD+PHP take a 300-dpi file, overlay a string on it, and 
output a 300-dpi file somehow?...  Or can anybody say for sure that 
lower resolution on a simple document like a Certificate would be 
okay, since it's gray-scale or something?

I'm not a graphic artist, and frequently end up with extremely large 
graphics files when I try to go hi-res, cuz I just don't understand 
what I'm doing.  A printer laughed at me last week for having an 
8-foot X 8-foot file for a music CD cover...  But he didn't charge me 
for the half-hour it took him to download it, so I reckon I can take 
it :-)

There will probably be a real graphic artist involved at some point, 
but I need background info to know what to push for, and I *KNOW* I 
could read stuff for the next 20 years and still not "get it" -- I've 
been reading this resolution/printing stuff for 20 years already and 
it just ain't sticking in my brain.

It doesn't help that one piece of software will say its 2400 dpi at 5 
inches and millions of colors, and another says it's 300 dpi at 8 
feet and 256 colors (or whatever) and it's all just too confusing. :-)

So am I really better off pushing for an outlay of $$$ for 
commercial, banner-less fdf or would GD and hi-res TIFF/JPEG/PNG be 
just as good at getting these "Certificates" out the door?

Or, am I just totally on the wrong track here? :-)

THANKS!!!

Apologies in advance for my repeated failure to grok basic graphic 
artist concepts. :-)  I understand just enough of it to get by not 
knowing any more...

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