GD Graphics (Draw) Library

GD is an open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by
programmers.

GD is written in C, and “wrappers” are available for Perl, PHP and other
languages. GD can read and write many different image formats. GD is commonly
used to generate charts, graphics, thumbnails, and most anything else, on the
fly. It is also useful to convert images to another format.

The most common applications of GD involve website development, although it
can be used with any standalone application!

The library was originally developed by Thomas Boutell and is now maintained
by many contributors (see the CONTRIBUTORS file).

If you like to contribute, report bugs, see how to contribute document

For security related issues, see SECURITY.md.

Support available in

or using issues.

We also have a mailing list. To subscribe to any mailing list,
send an email to [email protected].
Then emails can be sent to [email protected].

Downloads/etc…

Please visit our homepage for more details.

Supported Image Formats

GD has support for:

• WebP
  via libwebp
• JPEG
  via IJG/libjpeg
  or libjpeg-turbo
  • Does not include JPEG 2000
• PNG
  via libpng
• AVIF
  via libavif
• HEIF
  via libheif
  • This includes AVIF
    read support if your system’s libheif has AV1 decoding.
• TIFF
  via libtiff
• BMP (builtin)
• GIF (builtin)
• TGA (builtin)
• WBMP
  (builtin)
• XPM
  via libXpm

Besides that, GD depends on some external libraries, which are all optional
and disabled by default:

• FreeType for rendering fonts
• Fontconfig for configuring and customizing font access
• libraqm for complex text layout
• libimagequant for conversion of RGBA images
  to 8-bit indexed-color images
  • NOTE libimagequant is dual-licensed: GPLv3 and commercial license

Platforms supported

CI means whether we have an automatic CI for this platform.
If someone has CI for these platforms or any other platforms not listed here
and would like to add them to our automatic CI, please get in touch with us,
it will be much appreciated!

Platform	Support	CI
Linux x64	✓	✓
Linux x86	✓	✗
Linux ARM64	✓	✗
Windows x86	✓	✓
Windows x64	✓	✓
Windows arm64	✓	✗
macOS arm64	✓	✓
macOS x64	✓	✗
macOS M1	✓	✗
S390	✓	✗

It is also known to work on almost all variations of *BSD, Solaris, etc.
We don’t have CI nor environment to test them.
However many progamming languages binding do test libgd on these platforms.

Compilers

It should compile with all C99 and C++ compliant compilers,
either using CMake or the configure script.

We do have CI using:

• GCC
• CLang
• Visual Studio
• Xcode
• MingW

Supported Versions

• GD 2.3 (Branch GD-2.3) serie is in active support for bug fixes.
  No new additions will be added.
• GD 2.4 (master) is the active development branch. No release date yet.
• GD 3.0 has been started, focusing on high quality 2D Vector drawing APIs
  and full support of actual ARGB 32 bits/8bits or float.
  It is not production ready yet