[Magick-announce] Announcing ImageMagick 5.4.9

[Bob Friesenhahn]

The ImageMagick Studio LLC development group announces the release of
ImageMagick 5.4.9. Version 5.4.9 is primarily a bug-fix release but does
provide a number of significant new features. Users of ImageMagick 5.4.8
are strongly encouraged to update to 5.4.9.

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 5.4.8 release (see release ChangeLog for
details):

  o General:

    - Platform independent changes

      + ImageMagick now supports an "installed" configuration and
        an "uninstalled" configuration. The installed configuration
        looks in precise pre-determined places for configuration files
        and modules. The uninstalled configuration uses heuristics to
        try to find configuration files and modules. The default from
        the Unix configured build is to use the "installed"
        configuration, while the default for the Windows build is the
        "uninstalled" configuration. Unix binary distributions provided
        by ImageMagick Studio are configured using the "uninstalled"
        configuration and should run using the file heirarchy of the
        distribution archive.

      + ImageMagick may now be compiled with a 32-bit QuantumDepth
        (16-bytes per pixel + 4 bytes per colormap index). This mode is
        recommended only for those who need to preserve maximum
        resolution when processing their NSA spy photos.

      + Arcs are now rendered according to the SVG standard.

      + 'convert -list type' output is now more useful.

      + 16-bit RAW PPM files can now be written.

    - Windows specific changes

     + Magick++ demos plus supporting Visual C++ 6.0 project files
       are installed as part of the binary install package in order
       to assist those want to use the DLLs provided with the package.

     + Magick++ (C++ API) now builds as a DLL under Windows using Visual
       C++ 7.0 (in addition to Visual C++ 6.0).

  o Utilities enhancements/changes:

     - Use the -authenticate option to specify a password when viewing
       encrypted PDF files.

  o C API enhancements:
     - No changes in this release.

  o C++ API enhancements:

     - The API now supports the ability to specify UTF-8 (Unicode)
       text encoding for annotation text.

     - The compare() method supports comparing two images and obtaining
       error values representing the degree of difference.

     - The API headers have been made "cleaner" by moving more
       implementation definitions to private headers.

  o Perl API enhancements:
     - No changes in this release.

The ImageMagick WWW page is

  http://www.imagemagick.org/

The ImageMagick 5.4.9 source code is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-5.4.9.tar.gz

The ImageMagick 5.4.9 Windows install package is available via ftp as

 ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/binaries/ImageMagick-5.4.9-xp.exe

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

ImageMagick is developed by the members of the ImageMagick Studio
team:

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

We would like to give special thanks to several people who assist with
ImageMagick:

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.