Often a client will request some type of image manipulation performed
server side to support their application. A common example of this is
the simple 'add watermark' function that you see on so many sites, but
the examples can quickly get more complicated including items such as
sharpen, add text, overlay images, overlay eps drawings etc...
For more complicated image manipulation applications you need to move
to a larger solution than the built-in image handlers in most languages. For just such an occasion we settled on the
ImageMagick library, with associated
extensions. We are communicating with ImageMagick using php and the image magick libraries, but the focus of this article is the ImageMagick setup itself. Generally, we found the environment to be tricky to configure and not
very well documented.
Without going into unnecessary detail about the various challenges we
faced, we'd like to provide a rough guide to setting up this
environment. The most significant problem solving came around how ImageMagick finds
its delegates (jpeg, jasper, libpng, ghostscript). Essentially
ImageMagick expects these to be found within an 'ext' directory within the build source tree, that is
not created by default.
Building the system in the /tmp directory on a clean linux system (we used a fresh install of
White Box Linux, Respin 1) you should be able to follow these directions:
1) "Get" your copy of ImageMagick.
>wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.net/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8.tar.gz
2) Get your Delegates.
- These are add-ons that will handle various formats/functions for ImageMagick.
For jpeg support
>wget wget ftp://Ztp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
For jpeg2000 support
>wget wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/jasper-1.701.0.zip
For PNG support
>wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/libpng-1.2.12.tar.gz
For GhostScript eps / ai support
>wget http://www.peregrinehw.com/downloads/gd/ghostscript-8.15.tar.bz2
For GhostScript fonts support
>wget http://www.peregrinehw.com/downloads/gd/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
3) Extract all of the Delegates.
- Copy the ghostscript fonts to the default dir.
>mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
>cp ./ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11/* /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/
4) Make an ‘ext’ directory in ImageMagick.
>mkdir ./ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/ext
5) Copy all the delegate folders to the 'ext' directory and give them nicer names such as:
jpeg
jasper
libpng
ghostscript
6) Configure and build each of your delegates.
>cd /tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/ext/jpeg
>./configure
>build
Repeat this for each of the delegates
7) Copy the jpeg folder into the ghostscript folder.
>cd /tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/ext/ghostscript
>./configure
>build
>cd /tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/ext/jasper
>./configure
>build
>cd /tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/ext/libpng
>./configure
>build
8) Create a text file for the configuration parameters for ImageMagick
>cd /tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9-8/
>touch myconf
>vi myconf
- Here are the contents of our configuration file, have a look and make sure it matches your environment
./configure
–with-windows-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/monotype/TrueType
–enable-shared –with-exif=yes –enable-lzw=yes
–with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts -without-x
CPPFLAGS=’-I/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/jpeg
-I/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/libpng
-I/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/jasper’
LDFLAGS=’-L/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/jpeg
-L/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/libpng -L/tmp/ImageMagick-6.2.9/ext/jasper
-lfreetype’
9) Run Configure
>./myconf > configure.log
- After configuration, inspect the configure.log , with any luck it will
look like this. As you can see jpeg2000 failed which was not a concern
to our project, but possibly if you did a make build on jasper before
configuring Imagemagick it would work.
Shared libraries –enable-shared=yes yes
Static libraries –enable-static=yes yes
Module support –with-modules=yes yes
GNU ld –with-gnu-ld=yes yes
Quantum depth –with-quantum-depth=16 16
Delegate Configuration:
BZLIB –with-bzlib=yes yes
DPS –with-dps=yes no
FlashPIX –with-fpx=no no
FontConfig –with-fontconfig=no no
FreeType –with-freetype=yes yes
GhostPCL None pcl6 (unknown)
Ghostscript None gs (8.15)
Ghostscript fonts –with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/
Ghostscript lib –with-gslib=yes no
Graphviz –with-gvc=yes no
JBIG –with-jbig=yes no
JPEG v1 –with-jpeg=yes yes
JPEG-2000 –with-jp2=yes no
LCMS –with-lcms=yes no
Magick++ –with-magick-plus-plus=yes yes
PERL –with-perl=yes /usr/bin/perl
PNG –with-png=yes yes
RSVG –with-rsvg=no no
TIFF –with-tiff=yes no
Windows fonts –with-windows-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/monotype/TrueType /usr/share/fonts/monotype/TrueType/
WMF –with-wmf=yes no
X11 –with-x=no no
XML –with-xml=yes yes
ZLIB –with-zlib=yes yes
10) Now run the "make" command.
>make && make install
- NOTE - This will take a long time.
11) On a succssesful build, you should be able to run this command line
>convert -background green -fill white -font Arial -size 165x40 label:"Codesta.Com" ImageMagickTest.gif
- Producing This Image
For more examples of ImageMagick Useage, check here.
Related Links
White Box Linux - http://www.whiteboxlinux.org
Image Magic - http://www.imagemagick.org
The Image Magick delegates repository - http://ftp.fifi.org/ImageMagick/delegates/
GhostScript - http://www.peregrinehw.com/downloads/gd/ghostscript-8.15.tar.bz2
GhostScript Fonts - http://www.peregrinehw.com/downloads/gd/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
Jpeg Libraries - ftp://Ztp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
Jasper (Jpeg2000 libraries) - ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/jasper-1.701.0.zip
PNG Libraries - ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/delegates/libpng-1.2.12.tar.gz
