Hi all,
First of all, i am glad to see a decent conventional looking forum for php online. (i hate those pesky, unusable mailing lists)
anyway, just a general comment regarding php and image creation.
I am working on a complex flash/php project, which uses a flash interface for image manipulation and creation. Flash is limited in what it can do at runtime, so i am using php for backend manipulation then reimporting modified images into flash. The crucial element here is speed, so heres my thoughts based on my experiences with various php methods for image manipulation:
1)php with GD. Did some experimenting with this, found it to be veeery slow. Perhaps somebody could explain why this was the case, i.e. is php the problem, or is the gd library slow?
2)php with imagemagick. using the imagemagick executables and calling these from php. Although imagemagick does have a large amount of image manipulation features, i)it is buggy in certain areas (most notably alpha channels) ii)with 32 bit support enabled it is slow. (presumably due to the precompiled executables having everything possible thrown in..)
3)php with c++. Because the above two options were simply too slow i have had to create my own exes to be called from php via c++. Used the free paintlib libraries, and this exe is far faster than 1) or 2).
Still havent found a fast solution to the problem of compositing text onto an image though, anybody have any experience with gd's effectiveness for this?
I would be v interested in hearing from anybody who has knowledge of any alternative methods/free exe's/libraries for image creation with php, and how effective they are.
bob
