ImageMagick 5.4.7

The ImageMagick Studio LLC development group announces the release of
ImageMagick 5.4.7.  Version 5.4.7 is a feature release but also resolves
bugs reported against 5.4.6.  5.4.7 will be available tommorrow, July 1
as it mirrors around the world.

ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write,
and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 72 major formats)
including popular formats like FlashPIX, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, Photo CD,
SVG, TIFF, and WMF.  With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically,
making it suitable for Web applications.  You can also resize, rotate,
sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your
completed work in the same or differing image format.  Image processing
operations are available from the command line, as well as through C,
C++, and PERL-based programming interfaces.

ImageMagick is copyrighted by ImageMagick Studio, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to making software imaging solutions freely available.
ImageMagick is available for free, may be used to support both open and
proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee.

Significant changes from the 5.4.6 release (see release ChangeLog for
details):

  o General:

    - Platform independent changes

     + IPTC support integrated. Supports both binary and text (iptcutil
       style) forms of IPTC profiles.
     + Lossless JPEG embedding (similar to provided by iptcutil) is
       supported.
     + Profile code enhanced to provide for not always copying the
       profile data.
     + The wbmp writer is fixed for monochrome images.
     + PICT files are automatically identified.

    - Windows specific changes

     - A Windows binary install package is available which is based
       on the Inno Setup Compiler "http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php".
     - VisualMagick build works with both Visual C++ 6.0 and 7.0.
     - Tracing support was incorporated for Win32 developers.
     - An ATL-based COM interface to the ImageMagick APIs is provided in
       the 'contrib' directory.  This is known to work with Visual Basic
       and WSH.  Using the COM interface from ASP is *not* supported due
       to threading issues.
     - Building under MinGW (GNU tools for Windows) has been improved.
     - The CLIPBOARD and EMF modules are now available in the Cygwin build.

    - Linux specific changes
     + Ghostscript fonts should be discovered automatically (while
       configuring) under Linux.
  
  o Utilities enhancements/changes:
    - The -encoding option may be used to specify the font encoding
      to use when rendering a TrueType font.  This is useful for
      fonts (e.g. symbol and international) that use a non-default
      encoding.

  o C API enhancements:
     - Locking under Windows has been rewritten.

  o C++ API enhancements:
     - No changes in this release.

  o Perl API enhancements:
     - Added multithread support.

The ImageMagick WWW page is

  http://www.imagemagick.org/
 
ImageMagick 5.4.7 is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-5.4.7.tar.gz

If ftp.imagemagick.org is overloaded, check the list of mirrors at
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/archives.html for other mirrors.

ImageMagick is developed by the members of the ImageMagick Studio
team:

John Cristy           - Principal designer and author.
Bob Friesenhahn       - Magick++, Unix modules, magic, configure, CVS,
                        tests, bug tracking, and WMF.
William Radcliffe     - VisualMagick, FlashPix, TIFF, timers,
                        watermarking, Windows modules, and fast polygon
                        renderer.
Glenn Randers-Pehrson - PNG, MNG, test scripts, documentation
                        enhancements.
Leonard Rosenthol     - Mac support, XCF, PSD, conjure, drawing
                        enhancements.

We would like to give special thanks to several people who assist with
ImageMagick:

Alexander Zimmermann  - Linux binary distributions.
Jaroslav Fojtik       - CUT, ART, and MATLAB coder modules.

There are many other individual contributors, some of whom made
significant contributions to ImageMagick but shall remain anonymous
anyway.