Your describing forum software perfectly. Look up open source forums.

The fonts are more than just the basic, a lot of special decorative fonts

I'd be interested to know what forum software can display non-standard font faces. (?)

Something that turns it to an image to display?

You're on the right track I think, dig around the documentation on ImageMagick.org. I think GD::Image can do this too. Not going to be an easy path, it involves some serious server-side programming to automate it, but I recall there are some methods to do this with ImageMagick.

Flash would be another way, but not sure how you would integrate non-standard fonts.

Yeah, I'm not looking for forums. This is like a phrase the user can type and it will display a sort of preview of the phrase with buttons for the attributes, which too change the preview.

I'll look into ImageMagick, but I wouldn't know where to begin for the programming, not having a template of sorts. I'll see what I can find though.

I'm much more familiar with Flash... but I've never seen inputs? Well, now that I google it, I suppose there are. I will probably look into this first.

The page already on the web that I'm emulating involves a series of .do scripts that the <form> inputs trigger, and the image source is as follows:
<img src="/GenerateTextAsImage.do">
and the colors and font images look similar to this:
<a href="/ManageCustomQuote.do?activity=setQuoteFont&quoteFontCode=7"><img src="/images/fonts/bettynoir.gif" height="32" width="200" border="0"><br></a>
And their shopping cart seems to be ran by .do files too.
I assume this is what you mean by the server-side programming, whatever is in these .do files.

Thanks for the responses!

Ahh, you're looking for myspace like text creators.

Thats a little harder to find since the people who have it on their sites don't want you to get it too but its out there, look up online graphics script.