GraphicsMagick Search site

- Home
- License
- Mission
- Download
- Installation
- FAQ
- News
- Formats

- Process
- Contribute
- CVS
- Mailing Lists
- ChangeLog
- Report Bugs
- Utilities
- Programming
- Links

# Installing GraphicsMagick

- Executive Summary
- Availability
- Documentation
- Installation
- Add-On Libraries & Programs

# Executive Summary

GraphicsMagick provides a comprehensive collection of utilities, programming interfaces, and GUIs, to support file format conversion, image processing, and 2D vector rendering.

GraphicsMagick is originally based on ImageMagick from ImageMagick Studio (which was originally written by John Cristy at Dupont). The goal of GraphicsMagick is to provide the highest quality product possible while encouraging open and active participation from all interested developers. The GraphicsMagick usage license is designed to allow it to be used for any application, including proprietary or GPLed applications. Please see the file Copyright.txt for the GraphicsMagick licence.

# Availability

The master ftp site for GraphicsMagick distributions is ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/. Bandwidth on this site is very limited, so it is recommended to download from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=73485 if possible.

GraphicsMagick is a continual work in progress. The very latest code is available from CVS. GraphicsMagick may be retrieved via CVS using the following procedure:

> To use CVS over SSH:

>     export CVS_RSH=ssh
>     export CVSROOT=":ext:anoncvs@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick"

> or to use CVS with its built-in (and insecure) pserver protocol:

>     export CVSROOT=":pserver:anonymous@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick"

> to set CVSROOT in the environment (adjust for your shell), or prepend -d followed by the CVS root to every command. For example:

>     cvs -d ":pserver:anonymous@cvs ...

> For brevity the following examples assume that CVSROOT is set in the environment:

>     cvs login
>     [ enter "anonymous" ]
>     cvs co GraphicsMagick

> If you would like to retrieve the (huge) Windows source package which includes the core GraphicsMagick sources along with all necessary third-party libraries use:

>     cvs co GraphicsMagick-NT

> If you would like to retrieve everything associated with GraphicsMagick (useful or not) use:

>     cvs co GraphicsMagick-World

# Documentation

> Open the file index.html in a web browser, or refer to the gm(1) manual page. Also read the GraphicsMagick frequently asked questions in the file www/FAQ.html.

# Installation

> GraphicsMagick may be compiled from source code for virtually any modern Unix system (including Linux and MacOS X) and Microsoft Windows. Installation instructions may be found in the following files (or their HTML equivalents):

> - Unix / MacOS-X / Cygwin / MinGW:

>   INSTALL-unix.txt

> - Microsoft Windows (Via "setup" style installer or from source code):

>   INSTALL-windows.txt

# Add-On Libraries & Programs

To further enhance the capabilities of GraphicsMagick, you may want to get these programs or libraries. Note that the Windows source package (equivalent to CVS module "GraphicsMagick-NT") includes (and builds) all of the library-based packages listed here.

- GraphicsMagick requires the BZLIB library from

  > http://www.bzip.org/

  to read and write BZip compressed MIFF images.

- GraphicsMagick requires 'ralcgm' from

  > http://www.agocg.ac.uk/train/cgm/ralcgm.htm

  to read the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) image format. You also need Ghostscript (see below).

- GraphicsMagick requires 'dcraw' from

  > http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/

  to read raw images from digital cameras. Use similar to:

      gm convert dcraw:infile outfile

- GraphicsMagick requires 'fig2dev' provided in the transfig package from

  > http://www.xfig.org/

  to read the Fig image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the FreeType software, version 2.0 or above, available as

  > http://www.freetype.org/

  to annotate with TrueType and Postscript Type 1 fonts. Note that enabling TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER in FreeType's include/freetype/config/ftoption.h will produce better glyph renderings but may violate an Apple patent.

- GraphicsMagick requires Ghostscript software (version 8.50 recommended) available from

  > http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

  to read the Postscript or the Portable Document format. Ghostscript is used to annotate an image when the FreeType library is not used, or an X server is not available. See the FreeType library above for another means to annotate an image. Note, Ghostscript must support the ppmraw device (type gs -h to verify). If Ghostscript is unavailable, the Display Postscript X11 extension is used to rasterize a Postscript document (assuming you define HasDPS and DPS is available). The DPS extension is less robust than Ghostscript in that it will only rasterize one page of a multi-page document.

  Ghostscript (release 7.0 and later) may optionally install a library (libgs) under Linux. If this library is installed, GraphicsMagick may be configured to use it. We do NOT recommend using this library under Unix type systems. The Ghostscript library does not support concurrency since only one instance of the interpreter is available. Unix systems will obtain better performance from executing Ghostscript as an external process since then multiple interpreters may execute at once on multiple CPU cores.

  Ghostscript provides its own modified version of libjpeg and libJasper while GraphicsMagick will be using these libraries as provided with the system. If Ghostscript is not using the same libraries, then identically named symbols may be used from the wrong code, causing confusion or a program crash. If conflicts cause JPEG to fail (JPEG returns an error regarding expected structure sizes), it may be necessary to use Ghostscript's copy of libjpeg for GraphicsMagick, and all delegate libraries which depend on libjpeg, or convince Ghostscript to build against an unmodified installed JPEG library (and lose compatibility with some Postscript files).

- GraphicsMagick requires hp2xx available from

  > http://www.gnu.org/software/hp2xx/hp2xx.html

  to read the HP-GL image format. Note that HPGL is a plotter file format. HP printers usually accept PCL format rather than HPGL format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the LCMS library available from

  > http://www.littlecms.com/

  to perform ICC CMS color management.

- GraphicsMagick requires gnuplot available from

  > http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/

  to read GNUPLOT plot files (with extension gplt).

- GraphicsMagick requires html2ps available from

  > http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

  to rasterize HTML files.

- GraphicsMagick requires the JBIG-Kit software available via HTTP from

  > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/jbigkit/

  to read the JBIG image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the Independent JPEG Group's software available via anonymous FTP as

  > ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz

  to read the JPEG v1 image format.

  Apply this JPEG patch to Independent JPEG Group's source distribution if you want to read lossless jpeg-encoded DICOM (medical) images:

  > ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/ljpeg-6b.tar.gz

  Use of lossless JPEG is not encouraged. Unless you have a requirement to read lossless jpeg-encoded DICOM images, please disregard the patch.

- GraphicsMagick requires the JasPer Project's JasPer library version 1.701.0 (or later) available via http from

  > http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper/

  to read and write the JPEG-2000 format. Please note that JasPer 1.900.1 may have a problem when used with GraphicsMagick's modules build. To solve this problem, edit the file src/libjasper/base/jas_init.c and comment out the line which invokes atexit().

- GraphicsMagick requires the MPEG utilities from the MPEG Software Simulation Group, which are available via anonymous FTP as

  > ftp://ftp.GraphicsMagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz

  to read or write the MPEG image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the PNG library, version 1.0 or above, from

  > http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngcode.html

  to read the PNG image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires ra_ppm from Greg Ward's Radiance software available from

  > http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/HOME.html

  to read the Radiance image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires rawtorle from the Utah Raster Toolkit available via anonymous FTP as

  > ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/urt-3.1b.tar.Z

  to write the RLE image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires scanimage from

  > http://www.sane-project.org/

  to import an image from a scanner device.

- GraphicsMagick requires Sam Leffler's TIFF software available via anonymous FTP at

  > ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/

  or via HTTP at

  > http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/

  to read the TIFF image format. It in turn optionally requires the JPEG and ZLIB libraries. Libtiff 3.8.2 or later is recommended.

- GraphicsMagick may optionally use the TRIO library from

  > http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctrio/

  to substitute for the vsnprintf function when the operating system does not provide one. Older operating systems (e.g. Solaris 2.5) may not provide a vsnprintf function. If vsnprintf (or the TRIO replacement) is not used, then vsprintf is used instead, which decreases the security of GraphicsMagick due to possible buffer overrun exploits.

- GraphicsMagick may optionally use the umem memory allocation library which is included in Sun's Solaris operating system or available from

  > https://labs.omniti.com/trac/portableumem/

  to provide enhanced versions of the standard memory allocation facilities. Use of umem may improve performance for multi-threaded programs and provides access to debugging features that detect memory leaks, buffer overruns, multiple frees, use of uninitialized data, use of freed data, and many other common pro- gramming errors.

- GraphicsMagick requires libwmf 0.2.5 (or later) from

  > http://sourceforge.net/projects/wvware/

  to render files in the Windows Meta File (WMF) metafile format (16-bit WMF files only, not 32-bit "EMF"). This is the format commonly used for Windows clipart (available on CD at your local computer or technical book store). WMF support requires the FreeType 2 library in order to render TrueType and Postscript fonts.

  While GraphicsMagick uses the libwmflite (parser) component of the libwmf package which does not depend on any special libraries, the libwmf package as a whole depends on FreeType 2 and either the xmlsoft libxml, or expat libraries. Since GraphicsMagick already uses libxml (for reading SVG and to retrieve files via HTTP or FTP), it is recommended that the options '--without-expat --with-xml' be supplied to libwmf's configure script.

  GraphicsMagick's WMF renderer provides some of the finest WMF rendering available due its use of antialiased drawing algorithms. You may select a background color or texture image to render on. For example, "-background '#ffffffff'" renders on a transparent background while "-texture plasma:fractal" renders on a fractal image.

  > A free set of Microsoft Windows fonts may be retrieved from http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/. Note that the license for these fonts requires that they be distributed in the original .exe form, but the Linux folks have found ways to deal with that on non-Windows systems.

- GraphicsMagick requires the FlashPIX library version 1.2.0 from the Digital Imaging Group in order to support the FlashPIX format. The FlashPIX library may be obtained from GraphicsMagick anonymous CVS by checking out the 'fpx' module, or retrieving the file libfpx-1.2.0.10.tar.gz from the ftp directory.

  > ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/.

  Please note that this library is not very portable. It is known to work properly under SPARC Solaris and Windows, but exhibits severe problems under FreeBSD and Linux.

- GraphicsMagick requires an X server for the 'display', 'animate', and 'import' functions to work properly. Unix systems usually provide an X server as part of their standard installation. For MacOS-X, X11 is a system install time option.

  A free X server for Microsoft Windows is available from

  > http://sources.redhat.com/win32-x11/

  The Cygwin port of XFree86 may also be used. It is included as part of Cygwin and may be selected from the Cygwin installer. Cygwin is available from

  > http://www.cygwin.com/

  There is a nearly free X server available for Windows and Macintosh at

  > http://www.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/

- GraphicsMagick requires libxml available from

  > http://xmlsoft.org/

  to read the SVG image format and to retrieve files from over a network via FTP and HTTP.

- GraphicsMagick requires the ZLIB library from

  > http://www.zlib.net/

  to read or write the PNG or Zip compressed MIFF images.

Copyright (C) 2003 - 2008 GraphicsMagick Group
Copyright (C) 2002 ImageMagick Studio
Copyright (C) 1999 E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company

This program is covered by multiple licenses, which are described in Copyright.txt. You should have received a copy of Copyright.txt with this package; otherwise see http://www.graphicsmagick.org/www/Copyright.html.