I want to give Python a chance. I really do.
But things don’t look too promising on the ImageMagick front.
I downloaded the PythonMagick tarball from ImageMagick.org and unzipped it.
Inside I find a Sconstruct file and a lot of source files – no README.
Hmmph – methinks I’ll have to download and install SCONS to build PythonMagick.
That’s a problem because if I have to download and install SCONS to build PythonMagick then so will our customers (if we ever migrate from Perl to Python – not saying this will happen anytime soon – we’re just kicking tyres). That might be just too much work for customers.
So I dig a little deeper – see what googling “PythonMagick” throws up…
- http://www.python.net/crew/zack/pymagick/ is a link to a page displaying “Object not found”
- http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonMagick is a page telling me that PythonMagick is a Python Library that uses ImageMagick. I know that. No other useful information here.
- http://www.procoders.net/pythonmagick is a “404 Not Found”
- http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/PythonMagick Ah ! Finally. This page tells me the following …
At this time PythonMagick only has an installer for Windows. A tar file also exists but there are difficulties getting it to compile on Linux. My understanding is that its because of some boost.python complexity…
- http://news.hping.org/comp.lang.python.archive/30907.html A thread on comp.lang.python leads to the conclusion that PythonMagick is no longer active.
If PXN8 was a destination site and not a white-label product, then it might be worth exploring PythonMagick further. Given that PXN8 must be installable on Windows, and Linux/FreeBSD with a minimum of hassle, I don’t think a Python/PythonMagick combination is a good choice for our customers. If you have experience with PythonMagick I’d love to hear from you.
I’ve never used PythonMagick, so I can’t help you there, but have you looked into PIL? It’s probably more commonly used than PM so you should have better luck finding documentation online for it.
Emmet,
PIL looks very interesting. I’ll definitely take a closer look.
Thanks.
Walter
PIL was useless in my case since PIL is unable to open compressed tiff unless you recompile with patch that can be found on googling
Well, someone seems to be developing PythonMagick, as 0.9.1 was released a couple of months ago. Seems to be easy to segfault, very thin wrapper around the C++ classes. Little documentation, but I suspect in part because the wrapping is so thin that a lot of the C++ docs are nearly directly applicable.
ChangeLog:
2009-05-13 0.9.1 Dan Kluev
http://www.imagemagick.org/download/python/