[Magick-announce] ImageMagick 5.5.7 Released

[psyche at studio.imagemagick.org]

The ImageMagick Studio LLC announces the release of ImageMagick 5.5.7.
ImageMagick 5.5.7 is currently available at

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/

The distribution will mirror this evening and be available world-wide by
tommorrow (05/12/03).

ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write,
and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 88 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 LLC, 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 ImageMagick 5.5.6 release:

  * We cannot reliably auto rotate PDF files so this feature was removed.
  * The conjure program did not correctly handle the gravity attribute.
  * The persistent cache reference count was not properly incremented.
  * Added $image->Describe() method to PerlMagick to interface to the
    DescribeImage() C API method.
  * Added support for the EXIF Tag Parsing Library.  Currently we simply
    display the tags when calling DescribeImage().  In the near future
    there will be support for modifying or adding tags.
  * Added Bob Friesenhahn's updated Windows installation instructions.
  * Interfaced the drawing routines with the new MagickWand API.
    MagickWand will be the primary public C interface to ImageMagick in
    the near future.
  * magick/effect.c: RandomChannelThresholdImage was not handling
    PseudoColor, non-gray images correctly.
  * png.c would not compile with libpng versions older than libpng-0.95,
    due to bugs introduced in ImageMagick version 5.5.2.
  * Implemented -random-threshold and -ordered-dither options.
  * The locale messaging system now uses a hash for fast lookup.
  * Updated libtool to the new released version, 1.5.
  * Fixed bug with decoding grayscale PNG images and JNG alpha channel
    at Q:32.
  * Now recognize 32-bit hex color specifications, patches provided by
    Bob Friesenhahn.
  * Started API wrappers based on Bob Friesenhahn's method suggestions.
  * Text annotations that started with '\n' were not rendered correctly.
  * Removed artifacts from images rotated with a small number of degrees.
  * Minor bug fix in the ParseGeometry() method.
  * Modified the non-public inline AlphaComposite() to use a PixelPacket
    pointer; previously it returned a PixelPacket structure.
  * You can now specify an image geometry as an image file (e.g. -geometry
    image.jpg).
  * Use new temporary file manager for JNG components.
  * Added support for 12-bit TIFF images.
  * Added improved locale message subsystem (contributed by Kyle Shorter).
  * Removed a bias from SampleImage() and DrawAffineImage() (bug report
    by Glenn Randers-Pehrson).
  * PerlMagick now recognizes percent values for fuzz or opacity.
  * Not enough memory allocated for reading PCX (bug report by Trevor
    Willis).
  * There were artifacts when using the Bessel function for resizing
    (bug report by Bob Friesenhahn).
  * Added -resample to convert to change the resolution of an image.
  * Added a temporary file manager that prevents race conditions and
    removes any remaining files on exit.
  * Prepped ImageMagick to work with Visual C++ 7.0 under Windows.
    The Windows configure patches came from William Radcliffe.
  * The refresh of the display image window no longer lags when the
    magnify window overlay it.
  * Numerous code clean-up and minor speed ups based on problem areas
    identified by Bob Friesenhahn.

We would like to give special thanks to several people who have contributed
to ImageMagick, including:

Bob Friesenhahn       - Magick++, Unix modules, file header 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 - Utilities, PNG, MNG, test scripts, documentation
                        enhancements.
Leonard Rosenthol     - Mac support, XCF, PSD, conjure, drawing
                        enhancements.
Alexander Zimmermann  - Linux binary distributions.
Jaroslav Fojtik       - CUT, ART, and MATLAB coder modules.