Pierre (Entries tagged as libGD)

GD 2.0.36RC1 is out

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:48:00 +0100

The first release candidate for 2.0.36 has been released! Please test it and report any issue

GD-2.0.35 has been released!

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:52:00 +0200

GD-2.0.35 has been released!

After five release candidates, 2.0.35 has been finally released. See the release announcement release notes for all the details. It contains numerous security related fixes, update is recommended.

On the good news side, I’m happy to announce that we now cooperate with Debian to create quality packages for GD library and the PHP extension. Kudo to Sean Finney to have made it possible. Stay tuned, I will post updates as soon as possible!

Screen capture with PHP and GD

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:04:00 +0200

To get a snapshot of a HTML page, a window or a complete screen was always something tricky to do in PHP. For one of my current projects, I had to check that our changes did not affect visually any page. An easy way to achieve this goal is to compare the rendered pages in the browsers itself, easy and time consuming (for a human being ).

That’s why I finally sit down and implemented imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow . They capture respectively the whole screen or a window (using its handle).

Thanks to Edin Kadribaši?, you can fetch a 5.2.x (Threadsage build only) DLL here, simply replace the php_gd2.dll by this one (it is what will be in 5.2.2).

Screenshot

 
<?php 
$im = imagegrabscreen();
imagepng($im,&#8220;myscreenshot.png&#8221;);
?>

Capture a window (IE for example)

<br />
<?php <br />
$browser = new <acronym title="&#8220;InternetExplorer.Application&#8221;">COM</acronym>;<br />
$handle = $browser->HWND;<br />
$browser->Visible = true;<br />
$im = imagegrabwindow($handle);<br />
$browser->Quit(); imagepng($im, &#8220;iesnap.png&#8221;);<br />
$im = imagegrabscreen(); <br />
?><br />

Capture a window (IE for example) but with its content!

 
<?php
$browser = new <acronym title="&#8220;InternetExplorer.Application&#8221;">COM</acronym>;
$handle = $browser->HWND;
$browser->Visible = true;
$browser->Navigate(&#8220;http://blog.thepimp.net&#8221;);
/* Still working? */
while ($browser->Busy) {
com_message_pump(4000);
}
$im = imagegrabwindow($handle, 0);
$browser->Quit();
imagepng($im, &#8220;iesnap.png&#8221;);
?>

IE in fullscreen mode

 
$browser = new <acronym title="&#8220;InternetExplorer.Application&#8221;">COM</acronym>;
$handle = $browser->HWND;
$browser->Visible = true;
$browser->FullScreen = true; 
$browser->Navigate(&#8220;http://blog.thepimp.net&#8221;);
/* Still working? */
while ($browser->Busy) {
com_message_pump(4000);
}
$im = imagegrabwindow($handle, 0);
$browser->Quit();
imagepng($im, &#8220;iesnap.png&#8221;);
?>

I use Internet Explorer as example, if you like to play more with IE and com, check out the IBrowser2 documentation at MSDN. It should work with any kind of window as long as you give the correct handle (usually $obj->HWND).

php_gd2.dll for 5.2.x thread safe build
php gd image documentation
IE manual (useful to tweak it from com_dotnet

First release candidate for GD 2.0.35

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:59:00 +0100

The first release candidate for the upcoming GD 2.0.35 has been released yesterday. It is a bug fixes only. The more important fix is about two possible race conditions in the freetype cache implementation. One in the rendering (glyph_draw) and one during the cache shutdown.

You can see the complete list of changes in the issues tracker or in the NEWS file.

Using GD with DevC++

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:10:00 +0100

A couple of persons asked me about using libGD with DevC++ or if I support it (devcpp is based or use mingw/gcc). The windows binaries work like a charm with DevCpp/Mingw or VisualC.

As I’m too lazy to write long texts and take screen shots, I recorded a little video to show how to create a small console application on windows using DevC++. Check it out here. I used camstudio on a windowsXP running in my freshly updated VirtualBox.

GD 2.0.34 has been released!

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:54:00 +0100

GD 2.0.34 has been released!

It took a lot of work to get this version released. Version 2.0.34 is a bug-fix-only release (all known security issues have been fixed), and upgrade is strongly recommended. It is also my very first GD release (hopefully, the first of many to come), and marks the official freeze of the 2.0.x tree, only security-related fixes will be made on this tree from now on.

Please find the release announcement here.

It is a second birth for the libGD project. Its new home now has all tools needed to continue its growth in an organic way:

Public CVS (webcvs)
Issues tracker
Public mailing lists
IRC channel on freenode: #libgd
Wiki

If you are a maintainer of a language binding, I will be more than happy to hear your needs or to host your project if you are lacking the infrastructure to do so yourself. Many projects have begun to bundle or fork away from the main project, but I hope we will find a way to clean the general mess (years without releases did not help). In short, any feedback, requests, contributions or patches are welcome!

The future of the project is now looking way better than only a couple of months ago. We have already started to work on the next improvements, which will be included in the 2.1.0 release. Stay tuned!

phpgd.com

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:37:53 +0100

In his news section, Dams introduces the “new” phpGD website, a site dedicated to PHP and GD. I have not heard about it until now and I am nicely surprised about this initiative.

There is a couple of nice scripts, and your contributions are welcome.

I will hang around the forums, it could be a niceway to get more feedbacks (good or bad :-), even if I try to focus on my vapourware

See you there!

phpGD

imagepng, take #2

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:19:46 +0100

Bernhard Seefeld was testing the new compression option for imagepng and was wondering why there is still a relative big difference in image sizes.

In my first attempt to create smaller images, I only allowed to change the compression, it was not sufficient to get really lite pictures.

After a short look to the libpng codebase (and the horrible imagick doc), I added a last argument to imagepng, the filtering mode. Here are the results, sorted by size (a.png is the source image):

<br />
18650 a.png<br />

<br />
18556 none.png<br />
18556 all.png<br />
24536 sub.png<br />
28727 up.png<br />
29095 paeth.png<br />
32788 default.png<br />
36658 avg.png<br />

I used this little script, if you like to test it:

<br />
<?php<br />
$im = imagecreatefrompng(&#8220;a.png&#8221;);<br />
imagesavealpha($im,true);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;default.png&#8221;, 9);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;none.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_NO_FILTER);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;sub.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_FILTER_SUB);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;up.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_FILTER_UP);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;avg.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_FILTER_AVG);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;paeth.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_FILTER_PAETH);<br />
imagepng($im, &#8220;all.png&#8221;, 9, PNG_ALL_FILTER);<br />
?><br />

I save the alpha channel as the source image has a transparent “background”, but it is not really relevant here

The option will be present from PHP 5.1.3 (or whatever will be the next 5.x release) have fun while saving your bandwidth

What's new in GD, 5.1.x, #2

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:30:00 +0100

With the png compression, I also forgot the couple of filters added in php5 some months ago. Like any additions after php 5.0, they have been added to the HEAD, which happens to 5.1.x now. The convolution I presented yesterday is one of them.

Continue reading "What's new in GD, 5.1.x, #2"

What's new in GD, 5.1.x

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:33:34 +0100

I brought image convolutions to the public in PHP 5.1.0 (was lying in cvs for some months already), using a 3×3 matrix, the factor and the offset. A lot of really usefull or nice effects can be realized using image convolutions. I will show you some here.

The second introduction will be available in 5.1.2, it is nothing really new and I was even sure it was already done :P, thanks to Christian Stocker to remind me how wrong I was

Continue reading "What's new in GD, 5.1.x"

"My fonts do not work", fix it

nospam@example.com (Pierre) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 16:31:52 +0200

Quite a few bugs report in GD were about TTF. The ttf fonts either do not work at all or nice boxes were all you can see.

My main problem here is mal-formed TTF files. A good way to test your TTF is to use the FT2demos package. The archives are available here.

Continue reading ""My fonts do not work", fix it"