This specially goes for Fortune City counter that seems to be veeeeeery slow. I have one consisting only of one black pixel . This give you a clue where your counter is when you look at the pages off line, and doesn't result with ugly broken image. Counter options A is character representing digit type, e.g. A , B , C , D or E . See also pages by J for color names.
X are other variables described further.
See srgb, prgb. Because there is no padding, this will probably make problems with image size as soon as the counter reaches 100. If you want you can see my own counter test page . The two best are A and E . If you make some typos while writing the code, you would get error message from the script.