[Magick-announce] ImageMagick 5.5.2 released

[psyche at studio.imagemagick.org]

The ImageMagick Studio LLC development group announces the release
of ImageMagick 5.5.2.  Version 5.5.2 provides a number of significant
enhancements over earlier ImageMagick versions.  ImageMagick 5.5.2
is currently mirroring so you may need to wait up until 24 hours before it
is available.

ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write,
and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 87 major formats)
including popular formats like FlashPIX, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, Photo CD,
SVG, TIFF, and WMF.  With ImageMagick images can be created dynamically,
making it suitable for Web applications.  You can also resize, rotate,
sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your
completed work in the same or differing image format.  Image processing
operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++,
PERL, Visual Basic, VBscript, and Jscript- based programming interfaces.
Support for programming with Java and Python is provided by 3rd parties.

ImageMagick is copyrighted by ImageMagick Studio, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to making software imaging solutions freely available.
ImageMagick is available for free, may be used to support both open and
proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee.

Significant changes from the 5.5.1 release (see ChangeLog in the
distribution for details):

  o General:

    - Platform independent changes

      + Added read/write support for the JNG format.

      + Visual Directory (VID) creation is many times faster.

      + Quantizing a DirectClass image with less than 256 unique colors
        is no longer lossy.

      + Local adaptive thresholding is now supported via the -lat option.

      + ImageMagick now reads CMYK + alpha layered PSD files correctly.

      + PNG coder now supports the PNG8, PNG24, and PNG32 magick tag
        specifications in order to provide the user with more control over
        the output sub-format.

      + PDF coder now writes much smaller files when the source image
        is a TIFF file.

      + PS2 and PS3 coders now write valid Postscript files.

      + Most error messages are prepared for Internationalization.
        Complete Internationalization is still a few releases in the future.

    - Windows specific changes

      + The image pixel cache now supports large images (>2GB of total
        uncompressed pixel data) under Windows NT. Support for the large
        pixel cache is enabled by default.  Windows '95 is not supported
        unless the large pixel cache support is disabled.

      + Flashpix library now uses C++ standard <new> and iostreams.

      + Updated to use Jasper 1.600.0 for JPEG v2 support.

      + Updated to use FreeType 2.1.2 for TrueType and Postscript font
        support.

      + IMdisplay program now lists more supported file types in its
        "open file" dialog box.
  
  o Utilities enhancements/changes:

    - The 'display' utility is tremendously faster at loading large images
      (larger than the display size), and is faster at loading images,
      and exiting, in general.

  o C API enhancements:

    - Added AdaptiveThresholdImage() method.
    - List APIs improved.

  o C++ API enhancements:

    - Added adaptiveThreshold() method.
    - Added colorMapSize() method.

  o Perl API enhancements:

    - PerlMagick file I/O fix for perl 5.8.0 and above.

The ImageMagick WWW page is

  http://www.imagemagick.org/
 
The ImageMagick 5.5.2 source code is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-5.5.2.tar.gz

The ImageMagick 5.5.2 Windows install package is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/binaries/ImageMagick-i686-pc-windows.exe

or (QuantumDepth 8 version)

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/binaries/ImageMagick-i686-Q8-windows.exe

If ftp.imagemagick.org is overloaded, check the list of mirrors at
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/archives.html for other mirrors.

This ImageMagick distribution is brought to you by these folks:

John Cristy           - Principal designer and author.
Bob Friesenhahn       - Magick++, Unix modules, magic, configure, CVS,
                        tests, bug tracking, Windows install, WMF.
Glenn Randers-Pehrson - PNG, MNG, test scripts, documentation
                        enhancements.
Leonard Rosenthol     - Mac support, XCF, PSD, conjure, drawing
                        enhancements.
William Radcliffe     - VisualMagick, FlashPix, TIFF, timers,
                        watermarking, Windows modules, and polygon
                        renderer.
Alexander Zimmermann  - Linux binary distributions.
Jaroslav Fojtik       - CUT, ART, and MATLAB coder modules.

There are many other individual contributors, some of whom made
significant contributions to ImageMagick but shall remain anonymous
anyway.