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| Developer(s) | Thomas Boutell |
| Stable release | 2.0.36 / November 28, 2007 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Graphical Library |
| License | BSD-like license |
| Website | LibGD |
The GD Graphics Library is a graphics software library by Thomas Boutell and others for dynamically manipulating images. Its native programming language is ANSI C, but it has interfaces for many other programming languages. It can create GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and WBMPs. Support for drawing GIFs was dropped in 1999 when Unisys revoked the royalty-free license granted to non-commercial software projects for the LZW compression method used by GIFs. When the Unisys patent expired worldwide on July 7, 2004, GIF support was subsequently re-enabled.
GD originally stood for "GIF Draw". However, since the revoking of the Unisys license, it has informally stood for "Graphics Draw".
GD can create images composed of lines, arcs, text (using program-selected fonts), other images, and multiple colors. Version 2.0 adds support for truecolor images, alpha channels, resampling (for smooth resizing of truecolor images), and many other features.
GD supports numerous programming languages including C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCaml, Tcl, Lua, Pascal, GNU Octave, REXX, and Ruby. In addition, the "Fly" command line interpreter allows for image creation ("on the fly") using GD. GD scripts can be thus be written in potentially any language and run using this tool.[1]
GD is extensively used with PHP, where a modified version supporting additional features is included by default as of PHP 4.3 and was an option before that. As of PHP 5.3, a system version of GD may be used as well to get the additional features previously only available to the bundled version of gd.
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Change in development
On January 4, 2007, the project was handed over to and is now headed by Pierre Joye, a well-known PHP developer. The new developer then released several versions.[2][3]
References
See also
External links
- GD Graphics Library (Current development site)
- GD Graphics Library (Old development site)
- Image Functions (PHP), support in PHP
Tutorials
- Creating Images with GD Library An example of image generation, using a png image on the server and adding .ttf fonts
- Introduction to Image Manipulation in PHP + GD
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