The GD Graphics Library is a graphics software library by Thomas Boutell and others for dynamically manipulating image

Image

An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...

s. Its native programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 is ANSI

American National Standards Institute

The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...

 C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, but it has interfaces for many other programming languages. It can create GIF

GIF

The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....

s, JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

s, PNGs, and WBMP

Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap Format

Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap Format is a monochrome graphics file format optimized for mobile computing devices....

s. Support for drawing GIFs was dropped in 1999 when Unisys

Unisys

Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...

 revoked the royalty-free license

License

The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...

 granted to non-commercial software projects for the LZW

LZW

Lempel–Ziv–Welch is a universal lossless data compression algorithm created by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It was published by Welch in 1984 as an improved implementation of the LZ78 algorithm published by Lempel and Ziv in 1978...

 compression method used by GIFs. When the Unisys patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 expired worldwide on July 7, 2004, GIF support was subsequently re-enabled.

GD originally stood for "GIF Draw". However, since the revoking of the Unisys license, it has informally stood for "Graphics Draw".

GD can create images composed of lines, arcs, text (using program-selected fonts), other images, and multiple colors. Version 2.0 adds support for truecolor images, alpha channels, resampling (for smooth resizing of truecolor images), and many other features.

GD supports numerous programming languages including C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

, Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, OCaml, Tcl

Tcl

Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...

, Lua

Lua programming language

Lua is a lightweight multi-paradigm programming language designed as a scripting language with extensible semantics as a primary goal. Lua has a relatively simple C API compared to other scripting languages.- History :...

, Pascal, GNU Octave

GNU Octave

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB...

, REXX

REXX

REXX is an interpreted programming language that was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language that was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read...

, and Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

. In addition, the "Fly" command line interpreter allows for image creation ("on the fly") using GD. GD scripts can be thus be written in potentially any language and run using this tool.

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.

Change in development

On January 4, 2007, the project was handed over to and is now headed by Pierre Joye, a well-known PHP developer. The new developer then released several versions, but there have been no releases since 2007.

Example

This is an example from the PHP GD documentation on the imagefilledarc function



// create image
$image = imagecreatetruecolor(100, 100);

// allocate some colors
$white = imagecolorallocate($image, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF);
$gray = imagecolorallocate($image, 0xC0, 0xC0, 0xC0);
$darkgray = imagecolorallocate($image, 0x90, 0x90, 0x90);
$navy = imagecolorallocate($image, 0x00, 0x00, 0x80);
$darknavy = imagecolorallocate($image, 0x00, 0x00, 0x50);
$red = imagecolorallocate($image, 0xFF, 0x00, 0x00);
$darkred = imagecolorallocate($image, 0x90, 0x00, 0x00);

// make the 3D effect
for ($i = 60; $i > 50; $i--) {
imagefilledarc($image, 50, $i, 100, 50, 0, 45, $darknavy, IMG_ARC_PIE);
imagefilledarc($image, 50, $i, 100, 50, 45, 75 , $darkgray, IMG_ARC_PIE);
imagefilledarc($image, 50, $i, 100, 50, 75, 360 , $darkred, IMG_ARC_PIE);
}

imagefilledarc($image, 50, 50, 100, 50, 0, 45, $navy, IMG_ARC_PIE);
imagefilledarc($image, 50, 50, 100, 50, 45, 75 , $gray, IMG_ARC_PIE);
imagefilledarc($image, 50, 50, 100, 50, 75, 360 , $red, IMG_ARC_PIE);

// flush image
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($image);
imagedestroy($image);
?>


Which outputs a 3D looking pie chart

External links

• PHP GD Bar Chart
• GD Graphics Library (Current development site)
• GD Graphics Library (Old development site)
• Image Functions (PHP), support in PHP
  PHP
  PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...