Graphics Programming with Perl

An increasing number of tasks in application programming and web design requires creating and manipulating graphics. Perl is a powerful and flexible language that is not commonly associated with graphics programming. The speed of developing in Perl plus the large number of freely available Perl graphics modules, make it an excellent option for the rapid development of graphics applications.

Graphics Programming with Perl is a guide to the graphics and imaging modules and tools available to the Perl programmer. It covers subjects ranging from drawing your own pictures and dynamic graphics for web pages to rendering three-dimensional scenes and manipulating individual image pixels. The text is liberally illustrated with example code and programs that show how to achieve common, and sometimes not so common, graphics programming tasks. For the even less common tasks, the book shows you how to write your own modules.

What's inside:

• How to create charts and graphs
• Serving graphics content to the WWW with CGI
• How to modularize your graphics code, and re-use it
• Code to manipulate image pixels (and how to do it fast)
• How to work with text in graphics
• A complete reference for Image::Magick
• Examples you can use and build on:
  • Adding watermarks to your images
  • Creating thumbnails
  • Dynamic web pages with charts
  • Building your own convolution filters
  • A web photo album
  • 3D animation with OpenGL and Renderman

Table of Contents

Part 1 Foundations 1

1 Overview of graphics 3

2 Overview of graphics file formats 15

3 Overview of tools and modules 27

Part 2 Creating graphics 35

4 Drawing 37

5 Creating charts 60

6 Graphics and the Web 90

7 Animations for the Web 122

8 Resizing and combining images 138

9 Three-dimensional graphics 153

Part 3 Special topics 173

10 Writing your own graphics modules 175

11 Controlling text placement 190

12 Manipulating pixels and transparency 210

Part 4 Appendices 239

A Image::Magick introduction & reference 241

B Color space conversion algorithms 284

C Module code 288