GraphicsMagick

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# Installing GraphicsMagick

# Introduction

GraphicsMagick provides a comprehensive collection of utilities, programming interfaces, and GUIs, to support file format conversion, image processing, and 2D vector rendering.

GraphicsMagick is originally based on ImageMagick from ImageMagick Studio (which was originally written by John Cristy at Dupont), but forking from it in late 2002, and becoming independent from it, while retaining the MIT-style license. The goal of GraphicsMagick is to provide the highest quality product possible while encouraging open and active participation from all interested developers. The GraphicsMagick usage license is designed to allow it to be used for any application, including proprietary or GPLed applications. Please see the file Copyright.txt for the GraphicsMagick licence.

# Availability

GraphicsMagick release files may be downloaded from SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/graphicsmagick/files/.

GraphicsMagick is a continual work in progress. The very latest code is available via the Mercurial distributed source control management tool (https://www.mercurial-scm.org/). GraphicsMagick may be retrieved from foss.heptapod.net or SourceForge via one of the following commands:

> hg clone https://foss.heptapod.net/graphicsmagick/graphicsmagick GM

> hg clone https://hg.code.sf.net/p/graphicsmagick/code/ GM

Mercurial provides a complete stand-alone repository which contains the full history of the GraphicsMagick project. You may use the cloned repository for your own purposes related to GraphicsMagick (e.g. manage local GraphicsMagick changes), and can easily pull updates from the main repository whenever you like.

# Documentation

> Open the file index.html in a web browser, or refer to the gm(1) manual page. Also read the GraphicsMagick frequently asked questions in the file www/FAQ.html.

# Installation

> GraphicsMagick may be compiled from source code for virtually any modern Unix system (including Linux and MacOS X) and Microsoft Windows. Installation instructions may be found in the following files (or their HTML equivalents):

> - Unix / Linux / *BSD / MacOS-X / Cygwin / MinGW:

>   Installation on Unix-like systems

> - Microsoft Windows (Via "setup" style installer or from source code):

>   Installation on Microsoft Windows

# Add-On Libraries & Programs

To further enhance the capabilities of GraphicsMagick, you may want to get these programs or libraries. Note that some of these packages are already integrated into the GraphicsMagick Mercurial repository for use when building under Microsoft Windows:

- GraphicsMagick requires the BZLIB library from

  > https://www.sourceware.org/bzip2/

  to read and write BZip compressed MIFF images.

- GraphicsMagick requires 'ralcgm' to read the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) image format. You also need Ghostscript and Ghostscript/URW Fonts (see below).

- GraphicsMagick requires 'dcraw' (version 8.95 or later) from

  > https://www.dechifro.org/dcraw/

  to read raw images from digital cameras. Dcraw is invoked automatically when used to read files using a common RAW file format extension.

- GraphicsMagick requires 'fig2dev' provided in the transfig package from

  > https://mcj.sourceforge.net/

  to read the Fig image format. Ghostscript and Ghostscript/URW Fonts (see below) are also required.

- GraphicsMagick requires the FreeType software, version 2.0 or above, available as

  > https://www.freetype.org/

  to annotate with TrueType, OpenType, and Postscript Type 1 fonts.

- GraphicsMagick requires Ghostscript software available from

  > https://ghostscript.com/releases/index.html

  to read the Postscript or the Portable Document Format (PDF).

  Ghostscript Fonts (also known as "URW Standard postscript fonts (cyrillicized)") are available from

  > https://sourceforge.net/projects/gs-fonts/

  Ghostscript has historically been observed to have severe security issues when reading untrusted Postscript files (does not apply to PDF). Examples of these severe security issues are being tricked into reading or writing arbitrary files when executing in "-dSAFER" mode, which which is supposed to prevent such access. Users of Ghostscript who may encounter untrusted Postscript files are recommended to assure that all security patches have been applied and it might be necessary to use the latest upstream release.

  Ghostscript is available for use under both free (GPL) and commercial licenses. We are not lawyers so we can not provide advice as to when the commercial license from Artifex is required. Please make sure that you are aware of Ghostscript licencing and usage terms if you plan to use it in some sort of commercial situation.

  Ghostscript is used as an external program under Unix-like systems, but is used via its DLL in the Microsoft Windows Visual Studio build.

- GraphicsMagick requires hp2xx available from

  > https://www.gnu.org/software/hp2xx/hp2xx.html

  to read the HP-GL image format. Note that HPGL is a plotter file format. HP printers usually accept PCL format rather than HPGL format. Ghostscript (see above) is also required.

- GraphicsMagick requires the lcms library (2.0 or later) available from

  > https://www.littlecms.com/

  to perform ICC CMS color management.

- GraphicsMagick requires Graphviz available from

  > https://www.graphviz.org/

  to read Graphvis 'dot' digraph files (with extension dot). Ghostscript (see above) is also required.

- GraphicsMagick requires html2ps available from

  > https://sourceforge.net/projects/html2ps/

  to rasterize HTML files. Ghostscript (see above) is also required.

- GraphicsMagick requires the JBIG-Kit software available via HTTP from

  > https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/jbigkit/

  to read and write the JBIG image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the WebP library version 0.1.99 (or later) available via HTTPS from

  > https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/

  to read and write the WebP image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the Independent JPEG Group's software available from

  > https://www.ijg.org/

  or libjpeg-turbo available from

  > https://libjpeg-turbo.org/ or https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo

  to read and write the JPEG v1 image format. The 'turbo' releases are much faster than the IJG releases on certain targets (due to using assembly code and other optimizations), but lack the SmartScale JPEG extension introduced in IJG JPEG v8, and the lossless coding mode JPEG extension introduced in IJG JPEG v9 (which is not compatible with standard lossless JPEG!).

  GraphicsMagick supports 8-bit, 12-bit, and 16-bit JPEG, provided a JPEG library (e.g. libjpeg-turbo) which supports those depths.

- GraphicsMagick requires the JasPer Project's JasPer library from https://jasper-software.github.io/jasper/ to read and write the JPEG-2000 format. Due to security concerns, using the latest version of JasPer is always recommended. Note that modern JasPer requires C'11 (2011) language support.

- On Unix-type systems, Windows/MinGW, and Windows/Cygwin, GraphicsMagick requires libltdl from libtool in order to support building GraphicsMagick with dynamically loadable modules. Libtool is available from

  > https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/

- GraphicsMagick requires the MPEG utilities (mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz) from the MPEG Software Simulation Group in order to read or write the MPEG image format.

- GraphicsMagick requires the LIBPNG library, version 1.0 or above, from

  > https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngcode.html

  to read or write the PNG, MNG, or JNG image formats. LIBPNG depends upon the ZLIB library (see below).

- GraphicsMagick requires Sam Leffler's TIFF software available via HTTPS at

  > https://libtiff.gitlab.io/libtiff/

  to read the TIFF image format. It in turn optionally requires the JBIG, JPEG, LERC, Deflate, LZMA, ZSTD, WebP, and ZLIB libraries. Libtiff 3.9.7 or later is required, but a recent release is always recommended.

- GraphicsMagick requires libzip available via HTTPS at

  > https://libzip.org/

  in in order to read the ORA format. It in turn optionally requires ZLIB, BZip2, LZMA (xz), ZSTD, and a crypto library (Common Crypto, GnuTLS, mbed TLS, OpenSSL, or Windows Cryptography).

- GraphicsMagick may optionally use the TRIO library from

  > https://sourceforge.net/projects/ctrio/

  to substitute for the vsnprintf function when the operating system does not provide one. Older operating systems (e.g. Solaris 2.5) may not provide a vsnprintf function. If vsnprintf (or the TRIO replacement) is not used, then vsprintf is used instead, which decreases the security of GraphicsMagick due to possible buffer overrun exploits. It is highly unlikely that TRIO is useful on any modern system.

- GraphicsMagick may optionally use the 'tcmalloc' library provided as part of Google gperftools available from

  > https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools

  to provide enhanced versions of the standard memory allocation facilities. Use of tcmalloc may improve performance for both single-threaded and multi-threaded programs. Benchmarking under Linux shows a doubling of performance with tcmalloc over the default glibc malloc when images are repeatedly allocated, cleared, and de-allocated.

- GraphicsMagick may optionally use the umem memory allocation library which is included in Sun's Solaris operating system, and OpenSolaris/Illumos derivatives, to provide enhanced versions of the standard memory allocation facilities. Use of umem may improve performance for multi-threaded programs and provides access to debugging features that detect memory leaks, buffer overruns, multiple frees, use of uninitialized data, use of freed data, and many other common programming errors.

- GraphicsMagick requires libwmflite from libwmf 0.2.13 (or later) from

  > https://github.com/caolanm/libwmf

  to render files in the Windows Meta File (WMF) metafile format (16-bit WMF files only, not 32-bit "EMF"). This is the format commonly used for Windows clipart (available on CD at your local computer or technical book store). WMF support requires the FreeType 2 library in order to render TrueType, OpenType, and Postscript fonts.

  While GraphicsMagick uses the libwmflite (parser) component of the libwmf package which does not depend on any special libraries, the libwmf package as a whole depends on FreeType 2 and either the xmlsoft libxml, or expat libraries. Since GraphicsMagick already uses libxml (for reading SVG and to retrieve files via HTTP or FTP), it is recommended that the options '--without-expat --with-xml' be supplied to libwmf's configure script. If the other features of libwmf are not needed, then the '--disable-heavy' option may be used to only build libwmflite.

  GraphicsMagick's WMF renderer provides some of the finest WMF rendering available due its use of antialiased drawing algorithms. You may select a background color or texture image to render on. For example, "-background '#ffffffff'" renders on a transparent background while "-texture plasma:fractal" renders on a fractal image.

  > A free set of Microsoft Windows fonts may be retrieved from https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/. Note that the license for these fonts requires that they be distributed in the original .exe form, but the Linux folks have found ways to deal with that on non-Windows systems.

- GraphicsMagick requires an X server for the 'display', 'animate', and 'import' functions to work properly. Unix systems usually provide an X server as part of their standard installation. For MacOS-X, X11 is a system install time option.

  A free X server for Microsoft Windows is included as part of Cygwin and may be selected from the Cygwin installer. Cygwin is available from

  > https://www.cygwin.com/

- GraphicsMagick requires libxml2 available from

  > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2

  to read the SVG image format and to retrieve files from over a network via FTP and HTTP.

- GraphicsMagick requires the liblzma library from XZ Utils available from

  > https://www.tukaani.org/xz/

  to support TIFF with LZMA compression and future LZMA-compression features (yet to be developed). The utilities from this package are also necessary in order to decompress GraphicsMagick packages distributed with ".xz" or ".lzma" extensions.

- GraphicsMagick requires the ZLIB library from

  > https://www.zlib.net/

  to read or write the PNG or Zip compressed MIFF images.

- GraphicsMagick requires the Zstandard (Zstd) library from

  > https://facebook.github.io/zstd/

  > > or

  > https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases

  to read or write Zstd compressed TIFF images. In the future it is likely that other purposes will be found for Zstd.

- GraphicsMagick may require the deflate library to link with libtiff.

  Libtiff may optionally depend on the libdeflate library (from https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate). Linking with this library may be necessary for builds where libtiff depends on libdeflate.

- GraphicsMagick requires the heif library (not yet incorporated in the Windows Visual Studio build) from

  > https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

  and the libde265 library from

  > https://github.com/strukturag/libde265

  to read HEIF/h.265 files and HEIF/AVIF files. Libheif makes use of libde265 for h.265/HEVC decoding and libx265 for encoding. GraphicsMagick does not itself provide any h.265/HEVC algoriths and it does not currently support encoding.

  The HEVC codec is covered by a huge number of patents (the MPEG LA HEVC patent list is 164 pages long!). While GraphicsMagick is unable to grant any patent usage rights to users or offer legal advice, HEVC patents are normally paid for "per device" and so it is possible and even likely that the user's modern "device" is already covered. For example, users of Windows 10, Apple's OS-X, or popular video cards may already be entitled to use the HEVC codec since the vendor has already paid for it. Some countries do not support software patents. The user is responsible for assuring that some entity has paid to allow use of any applicable HEVC patents on their device, or that the patents do not apply in their country.

  Libheif optionally supports many more dependencies (see https://github.com/strukturag/libheif for details):

  The x256 library from

  > https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265_git/src/master

  to support h.265/HEVC encoding.

  The openh264 library from

  > https://github.com/cisco/openh264

  to support H.264 encoding and decoding.

  The aom library from

  > https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom

  to support AV1 encoding and decoding.

  The OpenJPEG library from

  > https://github.com/uclouvain/openjpeg

  To support JPEG 2000 encoding and decoding.

- GraphicsMagick requires the JPEG XL (JXL) library (release 0.7.0 or later) from

  > https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl

  to read and write JPEG XL files.

Copyright © GraphicsMagick Group 2002-2025