Perl Graphics Programming

Preface

Welcome to Perl Graphics Programming! This book is kind of a second, expanded edition of Programming Web Graphics, which was published in 1999. That book focused solely on the PNG, JPEG, and GIF image formats, and was intended more for web applications programmers than for Perl programmers. This book still has a heavy slant toward web applications, but it has been rewritten to fit in better with the other “applied Perl” books. The scope has also been expanded to include the SVG and SWF vector image formats. Intermediate-level Perl users will probably get the most out of this book, though hopefully it will demystify the manipulation of graphics files for newcomers as well.

Perl Graphics Programming takes a practical, resource-based approach to the material. Each section starts with a tour of the internals of the file format in question, followed by a tutorial and reference for one of the popular free Perl libraries or applications that implement the format. The reference sections are more than a generic rehash of the perldoc pages. In some cases, the reference material supplements existing documentation, and in some cases it provides help where the existing documentation is inadequate. Throughout, I have tried to anticipate the questions that a newcomer to the material might ask.

The software covered in this book includes:

• GD and GD::Graph, for creating indexed raster graphics

• ImageMagick, for handling a wide range of image formats

• The Gimp, for specialized image manipulation ...