use Perl

When I started working on pVoice 2.0, I planned to use Image::Magick (or PerlMagick if you like) for processing images. At that time however, I was unable to get an Image::Magick package that could be distributed with pVoice without having to install the complete ImageMagick.

Recently I discovered a PPM repository at http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppmdir/ which provides Image::Magick 6.1.0, compatible with PAR (as he calls it). I was delighted and immediately started to write a replacement for AAC::Pvoice::Bitmap, so it would use Image::Magick. Everything worked fine on my development machine, so I packaged it with PAR, put it on another Windows XP machine, and it still worked. Great!

I then put the same package on my Win98 box and tried again. Everything worked fine until I closed pVoice. 'page fault'. Since adding the Image::Magick stuff was the only thing I had changed since my latest test, it had to come from there...

Today I created a (very) minimal test consisting of the following code:

use Image::Magick;
my $img = Image::Magick->new();
$img->Read(filename => 'logo.jpg');
$img->Set(magick => 'png');
$img->Write(filename => 'logo.png');

I ran this on five different Windows versions. The results were not making my any happier: Windows XP and Windows NT can run this without any problems. Windows 98SE and Windows ME generate the page fault, and Windows 95 can't even load Magick.dll (the dll that causes the pagefault on the mentioned installations)

This basically means I can't use the Image::Magick based AAC::Pvoice::Bitmap into production. Unless of course someone has a solution....