IMv7 What is happening
Posted: 2012-02-29T18:23:01-07:00
IMv7 is currently only available form the SVN (alpha development - very buggy - things changing constantally)xerenader wrote:I'm curios about what will be the features of IM7. Can you give me some features of it so that we can see if it will affect some of the features of our project? Right now we are using 6.7.3-1. Thanks.
Major features internally is any number of channels. Grey images (one channel) will actually be one channel (until colorspace changed) Extra channels allows better masking and will let operators abort computation for things like un-writable pixels. An transparency is actually stored as alpha values, not as matte values as it is in IMv6 (lots of calculation savings)
This will have lots of other impacts (mathematical composition for example, the old channel 'sync' flag, etc).
See Imagemagick Page...
http://imagemagick.org/script/porting.php
In the CLI "convert" will be replaced by "magick" which will allow the use of IM scripts, where options are being read from a file, OR from a pipeline (using a shell like tokenization - eg quotes and backslash escapes). Operations will really be performed immediately (in IMv6 they are actually done in groups) and errors and warning output immediately after each option.
This will allows the use of "magick" as a co-processor for Shell or PHP scripts where you run a single "magick" command in the background and the script feeds that command with options to perform. The separate process holds the images, continuously while returning required information back to the script so it can decide how to proceed, without needing intermediate images to be saved and running multiple IM commands.
Other changes will be merger and clean up of many options (depreciations, some re-organisation). Aalso the addition of a -read option to read images. That may not seem like much but it will allow "mogrify" to read in secondary images and handle 'image list operators' such as "-composite" (EG put a logo on multiple images - in place), where previously it wasn't able to do this.
For the main goals of Imv7, CLI, and argument escape handling, see....
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/bugs/