use Perl

I finally released Imager 0.44.

Now for 0.45...

I'm looking to:

• improve the library probe mechanism - in particular to use freetype-config/pkg-config if it's available
• audit some of the other built-in image file format code
• add a cookbook (documentation), and
• probably other clean-up along the way

Doing this type of clean-up isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but I'd like to have a clean base to add new features to when I get around to it.

After way too long I've created an Imager 0.44 release candidate. This is available from CPAN as development release 0.43_03.

If you can, please run the Imager test suite. The simplest way to do this is with the CPAN shell:

    perl -MCPAN -eshell
    test T/TO/TONYC/Imager-0.43_03.tar.gz

Of course, before I try to do any of the high level text output done, I want to try to make the feature set between Imager's various font drivers a bit more consistent.

Yesterday, only the Freetype2 driver had support for UTF8, transformations and the has_chars() method.

I was all set to rebuild the Freetype 1.x driver's caching mechanism with something more complex (and probably more buggy) when Addi suggested a simpler implementation. Doh!

Hence the first step is done - the FT1.x driver has UTF8 support.

Now for the rest.

Arnar released Imager 0.40 last week, followed quickly by 0.41, since I hadn't tested the changes I'd made to the giflib tests without giflib. Oops.

But it's out the virtual door now. So what do we do for Imager 0.42?

One thing I've always found picky and annoying is laying out text, whether it's just aligning text around a point, or filling a box with it, and Imager doesn't make this any easier, since the bounding_box() method simply returns a list of fairly basic information, which makes it difficult to read the code that uses it.

What I want to try to do is provide some tools to make it easy to do both simple tasks like aligning a line of text around a point, or in a box, and more complex tasks like filling a box with text, possibly including some way of handling richer text with face and font changes.

The ultimate result of all this would of course be pod2Imager ;).

Of course writing such tools at the perl level would require more access to glyph metrics, which could be useful to the masochists who want to do all the above themselves.

Now I just need to find the time to do all of this.

I rediscovered MegaTokyo yesterday. Listen to it suck my day away.

At least I've read the whole lot now, so it should only suck a few minutes away per day now.

.

After a hectic Easter, there's an update to Imager0.40pre1 - pre2! This fixes all the bugs reported on RT.cpan.org and a few more:

• Broken versions of giflib are now reported to the user more obviously.
• grayscale images are now quantized correctly
• better OS X support, since some of Imager's exported symbols were causing conflicts with some perl builds
• $img->box(fill=>...) was going into an infinite loop on non-8bit/sample images or where the fill only provides a double interface

You can download pre2 from the Imager development page.

* Any unpatched 4.1.0 :)

It's been a while since I wrote anything here.

Over the last few weeks I rewrote the GIF writer to avoid the GIF specific options handling, and to use tags instead. I also added some compatibility code to convert the older parameters (warning by default.)

Beyond this Imager has had a lot of work done on it since October, including a bunch of bug fixes, a reorganization of the documentation, which will hopefully make it less unwieldly, and support for Mac OSX.

Addi's considering releasing 0.40 soon, so if you're reading this please pull down Imager CVS and give it a go :)

I still need to create a demo for image based fills. Sigh.

I've been very busy with work over the last few weeks, and finally I'm working sane hours again. I hope.

Addi's planning on releasing 0.39 of Imager to CPAN soon, and so has released 0.39pre1 for testing by anyone who's interested.

This means that all the funky new features that have been added since 0.38 will soon be available on CPAN.

Some of these include:

• Freetype 2 support, with transformations (rotation, shearing)
• fountain fill filter (supports most of the functionality of the gradient tool in the GIMP)
• general fills, including hatched, fountain (gradient), tiled images (with transformations), transparent colored fills. These can be used on boxes, filled arcs, and flood fills.
• masked images, so you can take a rectangular subset of an image, and even supply a write mask
• improved gif support (better handling of paletted images)
• reading and writing Windows BMP and TARGA files
• image tags, use to store meta-data read from an image, most formats support resolution information, some support more
• image rotation (you needed to mess around with the transform2() engine before this). The same engine can do other linear transformations.
• more ways of specifying a color, in Imager::Color->new
• exposed some filters that didn't appear in the OO interface
• image sharpening, either through the unsharp_mask filter or using the convolution filter
• better Win32 support, under both normal Win32 and cygwin
• lots of bug fixes

Well, I finally released Imager::Graph. It only has pie graph support but it shouldn't be too hard to add other graphs as time goes by.

I can already see improvements I want to make to it, but the current version (0.02) produces a fairly nice pie graph, and has plenty of knobs to tweak.