================================================================ Copyright (c) 1999-2004 Arnar M. Hrafnkelsson. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2004-2006 Anthony Cook. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. ================================================================ >> THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER << If you like or hate Imager, please let me know by sending mail to imager@imager.perl.org - I love feedback. ================================================================ ======================== 1. Patent infringements? ======================== Imager as such contains no patented algorithms. The external libraries (which are not written by me) may or may not contain patented algorithms. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR OBTAINING LICENSE(S) TO USE SUCH LIBRARIES SHOULD YOU NEED ANY. ======================== 2. Compiling and testing ======================== Some care has been taken to make the installation as smooth as possible. This is rather hard due to the difference between operating systems and site setups. To get started just type $ perl Makefile.PL It should blurb out a list of which libraries were found and which not. If you add a library to the machine after installing Imager it does not automatically become available in Imager. It only uses the libraries that are found. If the list of found libraries is not what you expected, then the Makefile.PL is either not searching in the right directories or your box does not have the libraries you think it does. For a list of where to get the libraries have a look at 3. External dependencies. To widen the search path for libraries and include files set the IM_INCPATH and IM_LIBPATH variables. The environment variables that matter when Makefile.PL is run are IM_INCPATH colon separated list of paths to extra include files IM_LIBPATH colon separated list of paths to extra library files IM_VERBOSE turns on verbose mode for the library scanning and such IM_MANUAL to manually select which libraries are used and which not IM_NOLOG if true logging will not be compiled into the module IM_DEBUG_MALLOC if true malloc debugging will be compiled into the module do not use IM_DEBUG_MALLOC in production - this slows everything down IM_CFLAGS Extra flags to pass to the compiler IM_LFLAGS Extra flags to pass to the linker IM_DFLAGS Extra flags to pass to the preprocessor When finding the libraries has been sorted out it's time for $ make and if that works then do $ make test If either fails do take a peek at the file errep.perl. It's creates a file report.txt. This is some information which will help me discover where the problem is so I can try to fix it in future releases. If you find running it ok (just remember - no warranty!) please send the report.txt via email to imager@imager.perl.org. Troubleshooting tips: A common problem is that libgif/libungif are sometimes linked to the X libraries and then running the tests fails. In that case something like: $ IM_LFLAGS="-L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11" perl Makefile.PL Which simply sets the environment variables for the extra libraries to include the X libraries (which we do not use at all, but must included since libgif has been linked with it). Otherwise you could just build giflib without any X11 dependencies: # must be a clean tree cd giflib-4.1.3 ./configure --without-x ... Also note that libgif has a few bugs: You can run something like $ perl -Iblib/lib -Iblib/arch t/t105gif.t This way you can see what comments the test script prints out. t/t105gif.t checks for an bug in libgif and prints out a patch if that bug is present, note that this bug only affects the more "advanced" features of libgif. If for some reason you have libungif-devel package installed but not libungif on RedHat then you will probably get lots of errors like undefined symbol: FreeSavedImages when running make test. Install libungif package to fix it. Stock libungif 4.1.2 or later seems to fix all of the bugs, if you have a problem that version of linungif (or later), let us know and we'll look into it. Imager needs to have a libtiff version of at least 3.5.5. In the future we might consider supporting older libtiff versions. For now you can either configure Imager manually (by setting the IM_MANUAL environment variable to 1, in sh: $ IM_MANUAL=1 perl Makefile.PL and simply say no to tiff support when asked if you want it, the same thing can be used to circumvent problems in gifs to get Imager going. If it worked just continue with the installation as normally (with make install). Freetype 1.x vs Freetype 2.x ---------------------------- These two libraries have some conflicting include file names, but as long as you don't put the Freetype 2.x freetype.h directory in the include path it should all work. Put the directory containing ft2build.h in the include path, but not the directory containing the freetype 2.x freetype.h. If you see compilation errors from font.c you've probably made the mistake of putting the Freetype 2.x freetype.h directory into the include path. To see which directories should be in the include path, try: freetype-config --cflags Macintosh dfont and suitcase font support ----------------------------------------- Through Freetype 2.1, Imager can use Macintosh DFON (.dfont) fonts and suitcase font files. If you want to be able to use more than just the first face in the font file though, you will need to configure freetype2 with the --with-old-mac-fonts option: ./configure --with-old-mac-fonts You can use the index option to get to the other font faces in the file: # get the second face from $file my $font = Imager::Font->new(file=>$file, index=>1) or die Imager->errstr; If you're using a suitcase font, you will also need to force the use of freetype 2 with the type argument: my $font = Imager::Font->new(file=>$suitcase, type=>'ft2', index=>$index) or die Imager->errstr; ======================== 3. External dependencies ======================== Some hints about getting the Imager module to find the libraries it needs for specific features. The libraries it uses are: jpeg: http://www.ijg.org/files/ ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz ftp.uu.net is still linked from many places, including the Independent JPEG Groups's home page, but it is non-functional. png: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html you also need zlib to use png: http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ We have encountered problems with libpng 1.0.1, which were fixed in 1.0.5 Note: you should probably be using zlib 1.1.4, since 1.1.3 has a potential security problem. gif: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libungif giflib/libungif has come a long way since the buggy versions around when Imager's gif support code was written. Preferably you should get at least version 4.1.3. If you have a recent Linux distribution you should be safe with whatever giflib it provides, but if you're building from source, please try to use the latest version. libgif 4.1.4 has no problems known to me at this point. At the time of writing you will need to manually select to install the 4.1.2-1 of cygwin's libungif package. tiff: http://www.libtiff.org/ t1: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/libs/graphics/ freetype2 or tt: http://www.freetype.org/ Precompiled versions of some of the libraries might be found at: AIX: http://www.bullfreeware.com/ ======================== 4. Logging and debugging ======================== Logging is compiled in by default - if you should want to get of it from the binaries you can do so by setting the env IMAGER_NOLOG to something. If you want to enable malloc debugging to check for leaks then set IMAGER_DEBUG_MALLOC to something. Needless to say it is pretty pointless to have malloc debug enabled with no logging since you can never see the malloc information that way. ================= 5. Win32 Support ================= Imager can be installed on Win32 systems. This was ported and tested with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 with build 623 of ActivePerl. You can use all of the features of Imager. You can also use Win32 GDI fonts directly by supplying the 'face' parameter to Imager::Font->new(...). I've tested with both MSVC++ 6.0 and cygwin (perl 5.6.1). If you see an error under cygwin during testing along the lines of: C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\...some dll to the same address as parent (0x...) != 0x.... you will need to install the cygwin rebase package and run: $ rebaseall -v Under cygwin you will need at least libungif 4.1.2 installed to prevent lockups in the gif test scripts. At the time of writing you need to select libungif-4.1.2-1 manually in the setup.exe installation tool. If you get errors from your make tool, make sure you're using the same make that was used to build your perl - generally GNU make for cygwin, nmake for Visual C/C++ and dmake for MinGW. ============ 6. Mac OS X ============ Building Imager under OS X is generally straightforward. There are some exceptions though: a) you may find to need to ranlib library files in place after you've installed them, for example: ranlib /usr/local/lib/libgif.a b) the version of GCC enabled by default on OS X 10.4 generates incorrect code for some functions. To work around this run: gcc_select 3 before building Imager and: gcc_select 4 after building Imager. This problem exhibits itself as test failures in t/t20fill.t c) if you want to build GCC 4.0 from scratch and use that you will need to adjust the command-line supplied during the link stage, so that there is some other option before the -bundle option. For example: perl Makefile.PL LDDLFLAGS="`perl -MConfig -e 'print "-g $Config{lddlflags}"'`" ======================= 7. General information ======================= The Imager module homepage is currently at: http://imager.perl.org/ The current docs are rather bad as I've been busy adding features but hopefully they will be updated soon. Until then you'll just have to use the source. The test scripts might also be a good idea. By activating the the #init_log lines in the test script you can get rather verbose debugging output from the C code. You can report bugs by pointing your browser at: https://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Imager ======================== 8. Thanks ======================== Thanks go to: Tony Cook ( TonyC ) Claes Jacobson ( Claes ) Philip Gwyn ( Leolo ) Michael Slade ( Micksa ) ( Cogent ) Brad Murray ( HalfJack ) Nicholas Dronen ( Veblen ) Michael G Schwern ( Schwern ) Rocco Caputo ( Dngor ) Graham barr ( Gbarr ) Mark-Jason Dominus ( Mjd ) Jerome Jason Alexander ( Jalex ) Randal R. Schwartz ( Merlyn ) Tkil ( ) Artur Bergman ( Sky ) Luc St-Louis ( Lucs ) PerlJam ( ) Roderick Schertler ( Roderick ) Nathan Torkington ( gnat ) (and just to play it safe) all those I forgot to mention.