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The ImageMagick Studio development group is proud to announce the
release of ImageMagick 5.1.0. The development of ImageMagick 5.1.0 was
an intense effort which resulted in a complete re-write of the
ImageMagick internals in order to provide the foundation needed to
support the evolving requirements of the next millennium. We know little
about what the next millennium will bring, but one thing that we do know
is that images to be processed will be bigger than ever before, and
that's what ImageMagick 5.1.0 delivers!
ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read,
write, and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 67 major
formats) including popluar formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, Photo CD,
and GIF. With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically, making it
suitable for Web applications. You can also resize, rotate, sharpen,
color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your completed
work in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations
are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, and
PERL-based programming interfaces.
ImageMagick is copyrighted by ImageMagick Studio, a nonprofit
organization. ImageMagick is available for free, may be used to support
both open and proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without
fee.
The ImageMagick WWW page is
http://www.ImageMagick.org/
ImageMagick 5.1.0 is available via ftp as
ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-5.1.0.tar.gz
Other versions are available as
ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/linux/
ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/nt/
ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/mac/
ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/vms/
These are the new features in 5.1.0:
Internal changes:
o Image sizes are limited by physical memory plus available disk
space on the machine, the limitations of the image file format,
or the file addressing limits of the operating system,
whichever comes first. This means that if you can figure out
how to build a big enough machine (and have plenty of time)
terabyte images can be processed.
o An image cache subsystem and API are provided to map portions
(as small as one pixel or as large as the entire image) of
images into memory and to save any updates.
o Memory mapping is used to access files. This is the most
efficient access mechanism available.
o DirectColor pixels are now stored in an efficient 32-bit
structure (or 64-bit when QuantumLeap is enabled).
o PseudoColor indices are now stored separately from the
DirectColor pixels (PseudoColor and DirectColor representations
are still available simultaneously).
o In-memory run-length encoding is eliminated.
o Compressed images are decompressed and compressed incrementally
in order to limit memory consumption.
o Lots of minor C API fixes and improvements.
External changes:
o Cache threshold setting for setting the boundary between use of
RAM or RAM + disk when processing an image:
- Use the --with-cache option (e.g. --with-cache=160) to
set the compiled-in default when running the configure script.
- Use -cache for ImageMagick utilities
- Set the cache_threshold attribute in PerlMagick
- Set the cacheThreshold attribute in Magick++
o The identify utility now displays precise read-time values.
o The Win32 build environment (now called "VisualMagick") is
completely re-done and supports building both DLL as well as static
libraries.
Related changes:
o Magick++ 0.9.1 is included in the ImageMagick package.
ImageMagick is developed by the members of the ImageMagick Studio
team:
John Cristy - Principal designer and author
Bob Friesenhahn - Magick++, configuration, CVS, tests, bug tracking
William Radcliffe - VisualMagick, FlashPix, TIFF, timers, watermarking
Glenn Randers-Pehrson - PNG, MNG, and test script improvements
as well as many individual contributors, some of whom made major
contributions to ImageMagick but shall remain nameless anyway.
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen _at_ simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen
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