Re: Image Magick Sucks!

[quidity]

The GD.pm library does what you seem to want, and it doesn't suck. At least as far as I've used it.

You can initialise from PNG, Jpeg, WBMP,GD or XBM formats, for others you might need to shop around the CPAN a bit and see what turns up.

In addition to simple setting of pixels, it also allows you to add text in various orientations, make polygons and draw lines to your heart's content.

For instance, this is a snippet of a script which draws a hexagon:

my @pts = (
         [$x1 + $ba, $y1 - $b1],
         [$x1 - $ba, $y1 - $b1],
         [$x1-2*$ba, $y1      ],
         [$x1 - $ba, $y1 + $b1],
         [$x1 + $ba, $y1 + $b1],
         [$x1+2*$ba, $y1      ],
        );
my $poly = new GD::Polygon;
$poly->addPt(@{$pts[$_]}) for (0..5);
$im->polygon($poly, $cols{BG});