Installing GraphicsMagick
Executive Summary
GraphicsMagick provides a comprehensive collection of utilities, programming interfaces, and GUIs, to support file format conversion, image processing, and 2D vector rendering.
GraphicsMagick is originally based on ImageMagick from ImageMagick Studio (which was originally written by John Cristy at Dupont). The goal of GraphicsMagick is to provide the highest quality product possible while encouraging open and active participation from all interested developers. The GraphicsMagick usage license is designed to allow it to be used for any application, including proprietary or GPLed applications. Please see the file Copyright.txt for the GraphicsMagick licence.
Availability
The master ftp site for GraphicsMagick distributions is ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/. Bandwidth on this site is very limited, so it is recommended to download from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/graphicsmagick/files/ if possible.
GraphicsMagick is a continual work in progress. The very latest code is available via the Mercurial distributed source control management tool (https://www.mercurial-scm.org/). GraphicsMagick may be retrieved via the following command:
hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/graphicsmagick/code/ GM
Mercurial provides a complete stand-alone repository which contains the full history of the GraphicsMagick project. You may use the cloned repository for your own purposes related to GraphicsMagick (e.g. manage local GraphicsMagick changes), and can easily pull GraphicsMagick updates from the main repository whenever you like.
Documentation
Open the file index.html in a web browser, or refer to the gm(1) manual page. Also read the GraphicsMagick frequently asked questions in the file www/FAQ.html.
Installation
GraphicsMagick may be compiled from source code for virtually any modern Unix system (including Linux and MacOS X) and Microsoft Windows. Installation instructions may be found in the following files (or their HTML equivalents):
Unix / Linux / *BSD / MacOS-X / Cygwin / MinGW:
Microsoft Windows (Via "setup" style installer or from source code):
Add-On Libraries & Programs
To further enhance the capabilities of GraphicsMagick, you may want to get these programs or libraries. Note that these packages are already integrated into the GraphicsMagick Mercurial repository for use when building under Microsoft Windows:
GraphicsMagick requires the BZLIB library from
to read and write BZip compressed MIFF images.
GraphicsMagick requires 'ralcgm' from
to read the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) image format. You also need Ghostscript and Ghostscript Fonts (see below).
GraphicsMagick requires 'dcraw' (version 8.95 or later) from
to read raw images from digital cameras. Dcraw is invoked automatically when used to read files using a common RAW file format extension.
GraphicsMagick requires 'fig2dev' provided in the transfig package from
to read the Fig image format. Ghostscript and Ghostscript Fonts (see below) are also required.
GraphicsMagick requires the FreeType software, version 2.0 or above, available as
to annotate with TrueType and Postscript Type 1 fonts.
GraphicsMagick requires Ghostscript software available from
to read the Postscript or the Portable Document Format (PDF).
Ghostscript Fonts (also known as "URW Standard postscript fonts (cyrillicized)") are available from
Ghostscript (at the time this text is written in October, 2018) has been observed to have severe security issues when reading untrusted Postscript files (does not apply to PDF). Examples of these severe security issues are being tricked into reading or writing arbitrary files when executing in "-dSAFER" mode, which which is supposed to prevent such access. Users of Ghostscript who may encounter untrusted Postscript files are recommended to assure that all security patches have been applied and it might be necessary to use the latest upstream release.
Ghostscript is available for use under both free (GPL) and commercial licenses. We are not lawyers so we can not provide advice as to when the commercial license from Artifex is required. Please make sure that you are aware of Ghostscript licencing and usage terms if you plan to use it in some sort of commercial situation.
Ghostscript (release 7.0 and later) may optionally install a library (libgs) under Linux. If this library is installed, GraphicsMagick may be configured to use it. We do NOT recommend using this library under Unix type systems. The Ghostscript library does not support concurrency since only one instance of the interpreter is available. Unix systems will obtain better performance from executing Ghostscript as an external process since then multiple interpreters may execute at once on multiple CPU cores.
If the Ghostscript library is used, then please be aware that Ghostscript provides its own modified version of libjpeg and libJasper while GraphicsMagick will be using these libraries as provided with the system. If Ghostscript is not using the same libraries, then identically named symbols may be used from the wrong code, causing confusion or a program crash. If conflicts cause JPEG to fail (JPEG returns an error regarding expected structure sizes), it may be necessary to use Ghostscript's copy of libjpeg for GraphicsMagick, and all delegate libraries which depend on libjpeg, or convince Ghostscript to build against an unmodified installed JPEG library (and lose compatibility with some Postscript files).
GraphicsMagick requires hp2xx available from
to read the HP-GL image format. Note that HPGL is a plotter file format. HP printers usually accept PCL format rather than HPGL format. Ghostscript (see above) is also required.
GraphicsMagick requires the lcms library (2.0 or later) available from
to perform ICC CMS color management.
GraphicsMagick requires Graphviz available from
to read Graphvis 'dot' digraph files (with extension dot). Ghostscript (see above) is also required.
GraphicsMagick requires html2ps available from
to rasterize HTML files. Ghostscript (see above) is also required.
GraphicsMagick requires the JBIG-Kit software available via HTTP from
to read and write the JBIG image format.
GraphicsMagick requires the WebP library version 0.1.99 (or later) available via HTTPS from
to read and write the WebP image format.
GraphicsMagick requires the Independent JPEG Group's software available from
or libjpeg-turbo available from
https://libjpeg-turbo.org/ or https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo
to read and write the JPEG v1 image format. The 'turbo' releases are much faster than the IJG releases on certain targets (due to using assembly code and other optimizations), but lack the SmartScale JPEG extension introduced in IJG JPEG v8, and the lossless coding mode JPEG extension introduced in IJG JPEG v9 (which is not compatible with standard lossless JPEG!).
GraphicsMagick supports both 8-bit and 12-bit JPEG, but unfortunately it does not yet support both at once.
Apply this JPEG patch to Independent JPEG Group's (6b release!) source distribution if you want to read lossless jpeg-encoded DICOM (medical) images:
ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/ljpeg-6b.tar.gz
Use of lossless JPEG is not encouraged. Unless you have a requirement to read lossless jpeg-encoded DICOM images, please disregard the patch.
GraphicsMagick requires the JasPer Project's JasPer library from https://jasper-software.github.io/jasper/ (although older versions back to 1.701.0 are still available via http from the original web site at http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper/) to read and write the JPEG-2000 format. Due to security concerns, using the latest version of JasPer is recommended.
Please note that JasPer 1.900.1 may have a problem when used with GraphicsMagick's modules build. To solve this problem, edit the file src/libjasper/base/jas_init.c and comment out the line which invokes atexit().
On Unix-type systems, Windows/MinGW, and Windows/Cygwin, GraphicsMagick requires libltdl from libtool in order to support building GraphicsMagick with dynamically loadable modules. Libtool is available via anonymous FTP from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libtool/
GraphicsMagick requires the MPEG utilities from the MPEG Software Simulation Group, which are available via anonymous FTP as
ftp://ftp.GraphicsMagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/delegates/mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz
to read or write the MPEG image format.
GraphicsMagick requires the LIBPNG library, version 1.0 or above, from
to read or write the PNG, MNG, or JNG image formats. LIBPNG depends upon the ZLIB library (see below).
GraphicsMagick requires Sam Leffler's TIFF software available via HTTP at
to read the TIFF image format. It in turn optionally requires the JPEG and ZLIB libraries. Libtiff 3.8.2 or later is recommended.
GraphicsMagick may optionally use the TRIO library from
to substitute for the vsnprintf function when the operating system does not provide one. Older operating systems (e.g. Solaris 2.5) may not provide a vsnprintf function. If vsnprintf (or the TRIO replacement) is not used, then vsprintf is used instead, which decreases the security of GraphicsMagick due to possible buffer overrun exploits.
GraphicsMagick may optionally use the 'tcmalloc' library provided as part of Google gperftools available from
to provide enhanced versions of the standard memory allocation facilities. Use of tcmalloc may improve performance for both single-threaded and multi-threaded programs. Benchmarking under Linux shows a doubling of performance with tcmalloc over the default glibc malloc when images are repeatedly allocated, cleared, and de-allocated.
GraphicsMagick may optionally use the umem memory allocation library which is included in Sun's Solaris operating system, and OpenSolaris/Illumos derivatives, or available from
to provide enhanced versions of the standard memory allocation facilities. Use of umem may improve performance for multi-threaded programs and provides access to debugging features that detect memory leaks, buffer overruns, multiple frees, use of uninitialized data, use of freed data, and many other common programming errors.
GraphicsMagick requires libwmflite from libwmf 0.2.5 (or later) from
to render files in the Windows Meta File (WMF) metafile format (16-bit WMF files only, not 32-bit "EMF"). This is the format commonly used for Windows clipart (available on CD at your local computer or technical book store). WMF support requires the FreeType 2 library in order to render TrueType and Postscript fonts.
While GraphicsMagick uses the libwmflite (parser) component of the libwmf package which does not depend on any special libraries, the libwmf package as a whole depends on FreeType 2 and either the xmlsoft libxml, or expat libraries. Since GraphicsMagick already uses libxml (for reading SVG and to retrieve files via HTTP or FTP), it is recommended that the options '--without-expat --with-xml' be supplied to libwmf's configure script. If the other features of libwmf are not needed, then the '--disable-heavy' option may be used to only build libwmflite.
GraphicsMagick's WMF renderer provides some of the finest WMF rendering available due its use of antialiased drawing algorithms. You may select a background color or texture image to render on. For example, "-background '#ffffffff'" renders on a transparent background while "-texture plasma:fractal" renders on a fractal image.
A free set of Microsoft Windows fonts may be retrieved from http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/. Note that the license for these fonts requires that they be distributed in the original .exe form, but the Linux folks have found ways to deal with that on non-Windows systems.
GraphicsMagick requires an X server for the 'display', 'animate', and 'import' functions to work properly. Unix systems usually provide an X server as part of their standard installation. For MacOS-X, X11 is a system install time option.
A free X server for Microsoft Windows is included as part of Cygwin and may be selected from the Cygwin installer. Cygwin is available from
There is a nearly free X server available for Windows and Macintosh at
GraphicsMagick requires libxml2 available from
to read the SVG image format and to retrieve files from over a network via FTP and HTTP.
GraphicsMagick requires the liblzma library from XZ Utils available from
to support TIFF with LZMA compression and future LZMA-compression features (yet to be developed). The utilities from this package are also necessary in order to decompress GraphicsMagick packages distributed with ".xz" or ".lzma" extensions.
GraphicsMagick requires the ZLIB library from
to read or write the PNG or Zip compressed MIFF images.
GraphicsMagick requires the Zstandard (Zstd) library from
https://facebook.github.io/zstd/
or
to read or write Zstd compressed TIFF images. In the future it is likely that other purposes will be found for Zstd.
GraphicsMagick may require the deflate library to link with libtiff.
Libtiff may optionally depend on the libdeflate library (from https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate). Linking with this library may be necessary for builds where libtiff depends on libdeflate.
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