Re: Imlib support...

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Marko Karppinen wrote: > > Well, the neat thing about Imlib2 is it is extensible... I.e. it has a > > plugin style architecture, and since it's also being driven by > > Enlightenment and sorta therefore by Gnome, it really is shaping up very > > nicely. Doing home grown stuff is nice, but unless you have some really > > I've exchanged a few thoughts with Matt McClanahan, the author of the > php_imlib module, about his work and Imlib2 in general. To me, the problem > is the unix-centric nature of Imlib2 -- after all, it does require the X > libraries among other things. We recently got a patch in to the Imlib2 author to make the Xlib dependency optional, for the record. ;) It's included in the recent Imlib2 1.0.0 release. Of course, this still doesn't solve the Unix requirement, and I don't personally see that going away in the forseeable future (Although stranger things have happened). > The imaging backend PHP needs is really, really simple. We're probably > talking about a smaller code base than the current GD distribution, and > that's pretty small. We need to be able to work with 32-bit ARGB images and > do basic cropping, scaling and blending operations; add FreeType 2 support > and file-format plugins as garnish and you're pretty much done. FreeType 2 support is something that should definitely be looked into. I'm not sure where the Imlib2 author (Raster) stands on it, haven't brought it up yet. File formats, as we've discussed, are easy since Imlib2 uses a modular system for its loaders. You can literally add new file loaders without restarting the PHP engine. (Whether or not this is a good thing is another matter). Matt