The GD Graphics Library is a graphics
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
library for dynamically manipulating
image
An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be di ...
s. It can create
AVIF
AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built up ...
s,
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...
s,
JPEG
JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
s,
PNGs,
WebP
WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.
Google announced the WebP ...
s and
WBMPs. The images can be composed of lines, arcs, text (using program-selected fonts), other images, and multiple colors, supporting
truecolor images,
alpha channel
In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pass ...
s,
resampling, and many other features.
History
The software was developed in 1994 by Thomas Boutell and others.
GD originally stood for "GIF Draw". However, since the revoking of the Unisys license, it has informally stood for "Graphics Draw".
Support for drawing GIFs was dropped in 1999 when
Unisys
Unisys Corporation is a global technology solutions company founded in 1986 and headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The company provides cloud, AI, digital workplace, logistics, and enterprise computing services.
History Founding
Unis ...
revoked the royalty-free
license
A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).
A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another part ...
granted to non-commercial software projects for the
LZW compression method used by GIFs. When the Unisys
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
expired worldwide on July 7, 2004, GIF support was subsequently re-enabled.
Version 2.0 added support for
truecolor images,
alpha channel
In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pass ...
s,
resampling (for smooth resizing of truecolor images), and many other features.
Features
The "Fly" command line interpreter allows for image creation ("on the fly") using GD. GD scripts can thus be written in potentially any language and run using this tool.
Its native
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs.
Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...
is
ANSI
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...
C, but it has interfaces for many other programming languages. GD supports numerous programming languages including
C,
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
,
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed ...
,
Python,
OCaml
OCaml ( , formerly Objective Caml) is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, High-level programming language, high-level, Comparison of multi-paradigm programming languages, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the ...
,
Tcl
TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to:
Business
* TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company
** TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology
* Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league
* Trade Centre Limited ...
,
Lua,
Pascal,
GNU Octave
GNU Octave is a scientific programming language for scientific computing and numerical computation. Octave helps in solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly ...
,
Rexx
Rexx (restructured extended executor) is a high-level programming language developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw. Both proprietary and open-source software, open source Rexx interpreter (computing), interpreters exist for a wide range of comput ...
,
Ruby
Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...
and
Go. GD is extensively used with PHP, where a modified version supporting additional features is included by default as of PHP 4.3 and was an option before that. As of PHP 5.3, a system version of GD may be used as well, to get the additional features that were previously available only to the bundled version of GD.
See also
*
*
*
*
*
References
External links
* {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181018002538/http://www.w3lessons.com/2011/08/create-dynamic-bar-chart-in-php.html , date=2018-10-18 , title=PHP GD Bar Chart , nolink=y
Image Functions (PHP) support in
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
Free software programmed in C
Graphics libraries
Software using the BSD license