Perl Graphics Programming

What Is ImageMagick?

ImageMagick is a C library written by John Cristy. As of this writing, the current version is 5.3.x, with minor version numbers incrementing every few months. Image::Magick is the Perl interface to the library. It acts as a transparent API for manipulating a wide range of image file formats from Perl. As of ImageMagick v.4.0, Image::Magick comes with the standard distribution.

The official ImageMagick web page is http://www.imagemagick.org. Image::Magick is also available via CPAN. ImageMagick compiles and runs on virtually any Unix system, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and VMS.

An ImageMagick installation requires between 3 MB and 12 MB of disk space, depending on the platform, and you need 80 MB of virtual memory to work effectively. If you are using ImageMagick to dynamically generate web graphics, you should probably have at least 128 MB of physical RAM free to handle multiple simultaneous requests. Because ImageMagick was designed as a robust and versatile package, it does have additional overhead that a specialized package like GD does not have. Keep this in mind when selecting which toolkit to use.

ImageMagick also requires a number of freely available graphics libraries in order to support certain graphics formats. Current versions of many of these libraries are available from the main FTP site, and some distributions (e.g., Windows) come packaged with the latest source for many of these libraries. The requirements are detailed in Appendix C.

Installing ImageMagick ...