[thelist] Server-side image drawing software?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Tue Oct 9 16:46:55 CDT 2001


At 2:36 PM 10/9/1, Mark Gregor wrote:
>I'm looking for a server side image drawing program that is preferably
>open source.  We're currently using GD Graphics Library (found here
>http://www.boutell.com/gd/) which has served us well but has some
>unfortunate limitations (e.g., it can't create anti-aliased images).
>We're primarily going to be using it to create graphs and state maps,
>but a generalized drawing program would be best.

Are you actually looking for drawing, or are the tasks more like changing
shape dimensions based on numeric text data (graphs), changing text,
compositing of arbitrary elements at arbitrary positions, etc?

How would you define a state map? I assume you're not specifying each
curve, but maybe you mean presenting an arbitrary detail of an existing
map, or perhaps show/hiding various layers atop it (parks, hospitals, etc).
Or...?

Here's another aid to navigating among approaches:
"Choosing a graphics generation solution"
http://www.macromedia.com/go/14582

Key tactic: What are the inputs? What types of throughput are needed? These
two questions often discriminate most quickly among the possible solutions.

jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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