Introduction PerlMagick, is an objected-oriented Perl interface to ImageMagick. Use the module to read, manipulate, or write an image or image sequence from within a Perl script. This makes it suitable for Web CGI scripts. You must have ImageMagick 5.2.4 above and Perl version 5.002 or greater installed on your system. Perl version 5.005_02 or greater is required for PerlMagick to work under NT. See http://www.simplesystems.org/ImageMagick/www/perl.html for additional information about PerlMagick. See http://www.simplesystems.org/ImageMagick/ for instructions about installing ImageMagick. Installation Get the PerlMagick distribution and type the following: gunzip PerlMagick-5.27.tar.gz tar xvf PerlMagick-5.27.tar cd Magick Next, edit Makefile.PL and change LIBS and INC to include the appropriate path information to the required libMagick library. You will also need library search paths (-L) to JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc. libraries if they were included with your installed version of ImageMagick. If an extension library is built as a shared library but not installed in the system's default library search path, you may need to add run-path information (often -R or -rpath) corresponding to the equivalent library search path option so that the library can be located at run-time. To create and install the dymamically-loaded version of PerlMagick (the preferred way), execute perl Makefile.PL make make install To create and install a new 'perl' executable (replacing your existing PERL interpreter!) with PerlMagick statically linked (but other libraries linked statically or dynamically according to system linker default), execute perl Makefile.PL make perl make -f Makefile.aperl inst_perl or to create and install a new PERL interpreter with a different name than 'perl' (e.g. 'PerlMagick') and with PerlMagick statically linked perl Makefile.PL MAP_TARGET=PerlMagick make PerlMagick make -f Makefile.aperl inst_perl See the ExtUtils::MakeMaker(3) manual page for more information on building PERL extensions (like PerlMagick). Use nmake instead of make on an NT system. For NT, you also need to copy IMagick.dll and X11.dll from the NT ImageMagick (see ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/nt) distribution to a path library such as c:\perl\lib. For Unix, you typically need to be root to install the software. There are ways around this. Consult the Perl manual pages for more information. You are now ready to utilize the PerlMagick routines from within your Perl scripts. Testing PerlMagick Before PerlMagick is installed, you may want to execute make test to verify that PERL can load the PerlMagick extension ok. Chances are some of the tests will fail if you do not have the proper delegates installed for formats like JPEG, TIFF, etc. To see a number of PerlMagick demonstration scripts, type cd demo make Example Perl Magick Script Here is an example script to get you started: #!/usr/local/bin/perl use Image::Magick; $q = Image::Magick->new; $x = $q->Read("model.gif", "logo.gif", "rose.gif"); warn "$x" if $x; $x = $q->Crop(geom=>'100x100+100+100'); warn "$x" if $x; $x = $q->Write("x.gif"); warn "$x" if $x; The script reads three images, crops them, and writes a single image as a GIF animation sequence.