More Drawing

Planned for 0.65, I'm planning on adding better drawing support, including:

• alpha channel blending for most drawing operations
• thick lines
• more combine modes

These had been planned for 0.63, but the alpha channel fixes took much too long. These has been planned for 0.64, but I had to do a bug-fix release.

File format support

I'm not planning on adding any new file formats to Imager. I am planning on expanding support in the currently supported formats, including wide data for TIFF, PNM and PNG files.

Any new formats can now go into Imager::File::type modules.

I have a draft Image::File::XPM in subversion (viewcvs)

More graphics primitives

The obvious ones we're missing are:

• bezier curves, filled and unfilled (or some other parametric curve). There us an undocumented polybezier, but it's very inefficient and untested.
• outline version of arc()

Better large sample support

Imager has had basic support for larger sample images for several releases now, but most of the code still works at 8-bits per sample.

The main thing holding me back from implementing this has been the large amount code duplication involved if I were to have both 8-bit and floating point implementations of each of the operations that Imager allows.

With the pre-processor included in 0.54 it should be simpler to handle large samples without so much source code duplication (there will be almost duplicate generated code though.)

Bundles

Once there are some extra file formats out there as separate dists I'll create a bundle dist.

Alien

I'm looking at making Alien distributions for each of the libraries that Imager depends on. If I'm successful I'll make the Imager bundle include them.

This is proving complex at the moment, Alien really needs more infrastructure.

I spent a little time on this, but corion actually produced something, though I don't think he's released anything at this point.