The ImageMagick Distributionand PerlMagick

ImageMagick was written by John Cristy and has been constantly developed and revised for several years. Newly modified versions are sometimes available every few weeks on the ftp site (see Section 5.2.2 later in this chapter). As of this writing the current version of ImageMagick is 4.1.x, with minor version numbers incremented once every few months. PerlMagick is currently at version 1.4x. The copyright to ImageMagick and PerlMagick is held by E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, who graciously allow the packages to be distributed (and redistributed) for free. As of ImageMagick 4.0, PerlMagick comes with the standard distribution.

Table 5.1 through Table 5.3 show the various file formats supported by ImageMagick. Most of these formats are not directly viewable on the Web, though external viewers that may be launched from a web browser are available for many of the formats. ImageMagick can be used to convert these other files to a format viewable on a browser, or to create thumbnails that link to a downloadable version of the full image. See Chapter 10 for scripts to convert and maintain groups of images in multiple formats.