GD library is an open source code library for the creation of images dynamically by the programmers. It can create many types of images which includes formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF and WBMP. In general GD is used to create charts, thumbnails, graphics and many more.

GD is designed in ANSI C programming language, however it can interface with many other programming language. This software is a developed by Thomas Boutell .It originally was designed for GIF draws, however since the revoking of Unisys license it stood for “Graphics draw “in general.

It is a very easy to use software and can be used for variety of graphics functions such as lines, arcs, text (using selected fonts), creating the images with other images and multiple colors. The latest versions support for truecolor images, alpha channels, and resampling as well and it also support various other features.

As stated earlier it is created in ANSI C language and it supports languages such as C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCml, Tcl, Pascal, GNU Octave, REXX, and Ruby.  It has an added tool “Fly” command line interpreter which allows image creation using GD. This helps in writing  scripts in any language and run it using Fly

Mostly GD is used with PHP, and it has moved to libgd.org.

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