The GraphicsMagick Group announces the release of GraphicsMagick 1.0.
GraphicsMagick is originally derived from a development version of
ImageMagick 5.5.2 from ImageMagick Studio.

GraphicsMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read,
write, and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 87 major
formats) including popular formats like FlashPIX, GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG,
Photo CD, SVG, TIFF, and WMF. With GraphicsMagick images can be created
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++, PERL, Visual Basic, VBscript, and Jscript-
based programming interfaces. Support for programming with Java and
Python is provided by 3rd parties.

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

Significant changes from the ImageMagick 5.5.1 release (see ChangeLog in
the distribution for details):

  o General:

    - Platform independent changes

      + Visual Directory (VID) creation is many times faster.

      + Quantizing a DirectClass image with less than 256 unique colors is
        no longer lossy.

      + Local adaptive thresholding is now supported via the -lat option.

      + GraphicsMagick now reads CMYK + alpha layered PSD files correctly.

      + PNG coder now supports the PNG8, PNG24, and PNG32 magick tag
        specifications in order to provide the user with more control
        over the output sub-format.

      + PDF coder now writes much smaller files when the source image
        is a TIFF file.

      + PS2 and PS3 coders now write valid Postscript files.

      + Most error messages are prepared for Internationalization.
        Complete Internationalization is still a few releases in the
        future.

    - Windows specific changes

     + The image pixel cache now supports large images (>2GB of total
       uncompressed pixel data) under Windows NT. Support for the large
       pixel cache is enabled by default.  Windows '95 is not supported
       unless the large pixel cache support is disabled.

     + Updated to use Jasper 1.600.0 for JPEG v2 support.

     + Updated to use FreeType 2.1.2 for TrueType and Postscript font
       support.

     + IMdisplay program now lists more supported file types in its
       "open file" dialog box.
  
  o Utilities enhancements/changes:

     - The 'display' utility is tremendously faster at loading large
       images (larger than the display size), and is faster at loading
       images, and exiting, in general.

  o C API enhancements:
     - Added AdaptiveThresholdImage() method.
     - List APIs improved.

  o C++ API enhancements:

     - Added adaptiveThreshold() method.
     - Added colorMapSize() method.

  o Perl API enhancements:
     - No changes in this release.

The GraphicsMagick WWW page is

  http://www.imagemagick.org/
 
The GraphicsMagick 1.0 source code is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/GraphicsMagick-1.0.tar.gz

The GraphicsMagick 1.0 Windows install package is available via ftp as

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/binaries/GraphicsMagick-i686-pc-windows.exe

or (QuantumDepth=8 version)

  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/binaries/GraphicsMagick-i686-Q8-windows.exe

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

GraphicsMagick is currently developed by the members of the
GraphicsMagick Group:

Bob Friesenhahn       - Magick++, Unix modules, file header magic, configure,
                        CVS, tests, bug tracking, Windows install, WMF.
William Radcliffe     - VisualMagick, FlashPix, TIFF, timers,
                        watermarking, Windows modules, and fast polygon
                        renderer.
Glenn Randers-Pehrson - Utilities, 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
GraphicsMagick:

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 GraphicsMagick but shall remain anonymous
anyway.

