Smarty and GD createimage

Hi, I am having a problem trying to crate images on the fly using a smarty plugin for that porpose: I'm using 4 files: a) index.php (the main script) b) template.tpl (the template) c) createimage.php (a script to create an image) d) function.createimage.php (a smarty plugin to create an image) The code for them is: index.php: <?php require_once('lib/smarty/Smarty.class.php'); $tpl = new Smarty; $tpl->template_dir = 'lib\tpl\templates';

  $tpl->config_dir    = 'lib\tpl\config';
  $tpl->cache_dir     = 'lib\tpl\cache';

$tpl->compile_dir = 'lib\tpl\templates_c'; $tpl->display('template.tpl'); ?> template.tpl: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <body> This is a imagecreate test <hr> <img src="{createimage}" border="0"> <hr> <img src="createimage.php" border="0"> <hr> </body> </html> createimage.php: <?php $imgwidth = 800; $imgheight = 24; $im = imagecreate($imgwidth,$imgheight); $black = ImageColorAllocate($im, 000, 000, 000); $grey = ImageColorAllocate($im, 113, 111, 100); $white = ImageColorAllocate($im, 255, 255, 255); imagerectangle($im, 0, 0, $imgwidth, $imgheight, $grey); imagerectangle($im, 1, 1, $imgwidth-2, $imgheight-2, $white); header("Content-type: image/png"); imagepng($im); imagedestroy($im); ?> function.createimage.php: <?php function smarty_function_createimage($params, &$smarty) { $imgwidth = 800; $imgheight = 24; $im = imagecreate($imgwidth,$imgheight); $black = ImageColorAllocate($im, 000, 000, 000); $grey = ImageColorAllocate($im, 113, 111, 100); $white = ImageColorAllocate($im, 255, 255, 255); imagerectangle($im, 0, 0, $imgwidth, $imgheight, $grey); imagerectangle($im, 1, 1, $imgwidth-2, $imgheight-2, $white); header("Content-type: image/png"); imagepng($im); imagedestroy($im); } ?> As you can see in the template I am trying to output 2 images, 1 created with the createimage plugin: <img src="{createimage}" border="0"> and other created with the createimage.php script: <img src="createimage.php" border="0"> and the createimage plugin and the createimage.php script have exactly the same code. The problem is that if I run this example I receive "The image “http://localhost/imgtest/index.php” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors". To avoid this error I have to comment the plugin line header("Content-type: image/png"); and the script runs fine, but obviously the image generated with the plugin doesn't show. So what I would like to know is if there is a way of using a smarty plugin to generate an image on the fly. Thank you! Nuno Mendes