Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By : Sohail Salehi
Book Image

ImageMagick Tricks

By: Sohail Salehi

Overview of this book

<p>The book is packed with interesting and fun examples. We had a lot of fun coming up with cool ways to demonstrate ImageMagick's power, and we're sure you'll have fun learning how to create them.<br /><br />Although the printed book is in black and white, there is a full colour PDF of the screenshots freely available that includes all of the images in the book. Use it to see exactly what the ImageMagick effects look like in colour, or browse through it and see just what you'll learn to do with this book.<br /><br />ImageMagick is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images using text-based commands. The commands can be issued from the command line, but more often will be included in web or desktop applications &acirc;&euro;&ldquo; carrying out complex image-manipulation tasks in response to the user's input.<br /><br />ImageMagick is a popular way for generating images on-the-fly in web pages, whether it's generating thumbnails from a large image, or creating complex combinations of images, text, and effects chosen by a visitor or the web site's creator.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
ImageMagick Tricks
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
5
Identify, Display, and Import
Index

Interfaces


ImageMagick APIs (Application Programming Interface) are programming tools and libraries that programmers are definitely interested in. With the help of these tools, everyone can write his/her own image processing application for performing customized actions (See Fig 1-4). Some of these interfaces will be discussed with practical examples in the last few chapters of this book. PerlMagick, MagickWand, Magick++, and MagickWand for PHP are the interfaces covered in this book.

Fig 1-4: ImageMagick can Talk to every Programming Language using Various Programming Interfaces

ImageMagick and X11 standard

ImageMagick is an X11 package. In computing, the X Window System (commonly known as X11) is a windowing system for image display. It is the standard graphical interface on OpenVMS, Unix, and Linux systems although Microsoft supports this standard as well.

This means that we can use ImageMagick in any platform that supports X11. So using ImageMagick, we can display any image on any workstation screen running an X server.

From a programmer's point of view, ImageMagick is a very flexible and portable package. As it has been written in the portable C programming language it will compile with any modern C compiler and no proprietary toolkits are required. Hence, every system can support it.