create image with text and save to folder

[eluser]Random dude[/eluser]
I'm making a site that shows a lot of Japanese calligraphy. I want to be able to show Japanese calligraphic fonts on the site, therefore the only option is save images of the Japanese characters and then use those images.

The goal:
After retrieving a Japanese character (a utf-8 string) from the database
-create a .png image using the string and a font file,
-and then save the image to the filesystem.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? All the tutorials I can find on the net focus on sending the created image to the browser which is quite different from what I want to do, so I was wondering if anyone had any resources or ideas they could point me to.

Thanks heaps in advance. I guess I'll have to just piece together the above steps separately to reach the correct solution. And cheers to CodeIgniter 2.0!

Nicholas.