DESCRIPTION gd is a graphics library. It allows your code to quickly draw images complete with lines, arcs, text, multiple colors, cut and paste from other images, and flood fills, and write out the result as a .GIF file. This is particularly useful in World Wide Web applications, where .GIF is the format used for inline images. gd is not a paint program. If you are looking for a paint program, try xpaint by David Koblas, available by anonymous FTP from ftp.netcom.com in pub/ko/koblas. (That package is for the X Window System; for the Mac and the PC, paint programs are considerably easier to find.) gd does not provide for every possible desirable graphics operation. It is not necessary or desirable for gd to become a kitchen-sink graphics package, but version 1.3 incorporates most of the commonly requested features for an 8-bit 2D package. Support for scalable fonts, and truecolor images, JPEG and PNG is planned for version 2.0. Version 1.3 was released to correct longstanding bugs and provide an LZW-free GIF compression routine. AUTHOR gd 1.2 was written by Thomas Boutell and is currently distributed by boutell.com, Inc. This port draws text using fonts in Russian KOI8-R encoding. -- Sergey Groznyh