9.2 The GD Extension

Before you can start generating images with PHP, you need to check that you actually have image-generation capabilities in your PHP installation. In this chapter we'll discuss using the GD extension, which allows PHP to use the open source GD graphics library available from http://www.boutell.com/gd/.

Load the familiar phpinfo( ) page and look for a section entitled "GD". You should see something similar to the following.

gd GD Support        enabled GD Version        2.0 or higher FreeType Support  enabled FreeType Linkage  with freetype JPG Support       enabled PNG Support       enabled WBMP Support      enabled

Pay close attention to the image types listed. These are the types of images you will be able to generate.

There have been three major revisions of GD and its API. Versions of GD before 1.6 support only the GIF format. Version 1.6 and later support JPEG, PNG, and WBMP, but not GIF (the GIF file format uses patented algorithms that require royalties). Version 2.x of GD added several new drawing primitives.

All GD 1.x versions are limited to 8-bit color. That is, the images you generate or manipulate with GD 1.x can contain only 256 different colors. For simple charts or graphs this is more than sufficient, but if you are dealing with photos or other images with more than 256 colors you will find the results less than satisfactory. Upgrade to GD 2.x to get true-color support, or use the Imlib2 library and corresponding PHP extension instead. The API for the Imlib2 extension is somewhat different from the GD extension API and is not covered in this chapter.