GD.pm A perl5 interface to Thomas Boutell's gd library.

ABSTRACT:

This is a autoloadable interface module for libgd, a popular library
for creating and manipulating GIF files.  With this library you can
create GIF images on the fly or modify existing files.  Features
include:

a.  lines, polygons, rectangles and arcs, both filled and unfilled
b.  flood fills
c.  the use of arbitrary images as brushes and as tiled fill patterns
d.  line styling (dashed lines and the like)
e.  horizontal and vertical text rendering
f.  support for transparency and interlacing

For full information on usage, see the accompanying man and html
documentation.

COPYRIGHT INFO

The GD.pm interface is copyright 1995, Lincoln D. Stein.  You are free
to use it for any purpose, commercial or noncommercial, provided that
if you redistribute the source code this statement of copyright
remains attached. The Gd library is covered separately, under a 1994
copyright by Quest Protein Database Center, Cold Spring Harbor Labs.
For usage information see the Gd documentation at the URL given below.

INSTALLATION:

1.  You'll need the following:
	a.  perl 5.001 or higher:
		ftp://ftp.netlabs.com/pub/outgoing/perl5.0
		(and many other places)
	b.  libgd.a
		http://www.boutell.com/gd/

    If you haven't already, configure and build them according to their
	instructions.  For best results, make sure they're installed
	in more-or-less "standard" places, e.g. /usr/local/bin/perl
	,/usr/local/lib/libgd.a, and /usr/local/include/gd.h.

    Note: After you build libgd.a you may see linker warnings
	about it not having a table of contents.  This seems
	to be harmless (at least on the systems I use), but you 
	can run ranlib on libgd.a to get rid of the warnings.

2.  Unpack the tar file and install in the perl source tree with the
	other external utilities, e.g. perl5.001/ext/GD/

3.  If you have dynamic linking, the rest is easy:

	a.  cd perl5.001/ext/GD
	b.  perl Makefile.PL
	c.  make
	d.  make install

4.  If you have static linking, you'll have to reconfigure and relink
	perl:

	a.  cd perl5.001
	b.  Configure
	c.  When it asks you if you want to statically link GD,
		answer YES
	d.  make
	e.  make install

5.  There are some demos you can run in ext/GD/demos.  They print GIF
	files to standard output.  To view the files, pipe their
	output to display or xv in this way:

	a.  cd perl5.001/ext/GD/demos
	b   shapes.pl | xv -

The current version is 1.00.  It is up to date with respect to gd version 1.2.
When version 2.0 of gd is released, the new version of GD will be found at

	http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/pub/software/WWW/GD.html

This interface has been tested on multiple systems.  A warning: you may
experience problems compiling this interface using the built-in "make" and
"cc" programs that Sun provides.  If this happens to you, obtain the GNU
equivalents, "gmake" and "gcc".  You'll be thankful you did in the long run.
If you encounter other problems on your system, drop me a
line:

	Lincoln Stein
	lstein@genome.wi.mit.edu
	http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/~lstein