Optional Features

--disable-compressed-files

disable reading and writing of gzip/bzip stream files

Normally support for being able to read and write gzip/bzip stream files (files which are additionally compressed using gzip or bzip) is a good thing, but for some formats it is necessary to decompress an entire input file before it may be validated and read. Decompressing the file may take a lot of time and disk space. If input files are not trustworthy, an apparently small file can take much more resources than expected. Use this option to reject such files.

--enable-prof

enable 'prof' profiling support (default disabled)

--enable-gprof

enable 'gprof' profiling support (default disabled)

--enable-gcov

enable 'gcov' profiling support (default disabled)

--disable-installed

disable building an installed GraphicsMagick (default enabled)

--enable-broken-coders

enable broken/dangerous file formats support

--disable-largefile

disable support for large (64 bit) file offsets

--disable-openmp

disable use of OpenMP (automatic multi-threaded loops) at all

--enable-openmp-slow

enable OpenMP for algorithms which sometimes run slower

--enable-symbol-prefix

enable prefixing library symbols with "Gm"

--enable-magick-compat

install ImageMagick utility shortcuts (default disabled)

--enable-maintainer-mode

enable additional Makefile rules which update generated files included in the distribution. Requires GNU make as well as a number of utilities and tools.

--enable-quantum-library-names

shared library name includes quantum depth to allow shared libraries with different quantum depths to co-exist in same directory (only one can be used for development)

Optional Packages/Options

--with-quantum-depth

number of bits in a pixel quantum (default 8). Also see '--enable-quantum-library-names.'

--with-modules

enable building dynamically loadable modules

--without-threads

disable POSIX threads API support

--with-frozenpaths

enable frozen delegate paths

--without-magick-plus-plus

disable build/install of Magick++

--with-perl

enable build/install of PerlMagick

--with-perl=PERL

use specified Perl binary to configure PerlMagick

--with-perl-options=OPTIONS

options to pass on command-line when generating PerlMagick's Makefile from Makefile.PL

--without-bzlib

disable BZLIB support

--with-fpx

enable FlashPIX support

--without-jbig

disable JBIG support

--without-webp

disable WEBP support

--without-jp2

disable JPEG v2 support

--with-jxl

enable JPEG-XL support

--without-jpeg

disable JPEG support

--without-jp2

disable JPEG v2 support

--without-lcms2

disable lcms (v2.X) support

--without-lzma

disable LZMA support

--without-png

disable PNG support

--without-tiff

disable TIFF support

--with-trio

enable TRIO library support

--without-ttf

disable TrueType support

--without-libzip

disable libzip support

--with-tcmalloc

enable Google perftools tcmalloc (minimal) memory allocation library support

--with-mtmalloc

enable Solaris mtmalloc memory allocation library support

--with-umem

enable Solaris libumem memory allocation library support

--without-wmf

disable WMF support

--with-fontpath

prepend to default font search path

--with-gs-font-dir

directory containing Ghostscript fonts

--with-windows-font-dir

directory containing MS-Windows fonts

--without-xml

disable XML support

--without-zlib

disable ZLIB support

--without-zstd

disable Zstd support

--with-x

use the X Window System

--with-share-path=DIR

Alternate path to share directory (default share/GraphicsMagick)

--with-libstdc=DIR

use libstdc++ in DIR (for GNU C++)

GraphicsMagick options represent either features to be enabled, disabled, or packages to be included in the build. When a feature is enabled (via --enable-something), it enables code already present in GraphicsMagick. When a package is enabled (via --with-something), the configure script will search for it, and if is is properly installed and ready to use (headers and built libraries are found by compiler) it will be included in the build. The configure script is delivered with all features disabled and all packages enabled. In general, the only reason to disable a package is if a package exists but it is unsuitable for the build (perhaps an old version or not compiled with the right compilation flags).

Several configure options require special note:

--enable-shared

The shared libraries are built and support for loading coder and process modules is enabled. Shared libraries are preferred because they allow programs to share common code, making the individual programs much smaller. In addition shared libraries are required in order for PerlMagick to be dynamically loaded by an installed PERL (otherwise an additional PERL (PerlMagick) must be installed. This option is not the default because all libraries used by GraphicsMagick must also be dynamic libraries if GraphicsMagick itself is to be dynamically loaded (such as for PerlMagick).

GraphicsMagick built with delegates (see MAGICK PLUG-INS below) can pose additional challenges. If GraphicsMagick is built using static libraries (the default without --enable-shared) then delegate libraries may be built as either static libraries or shared libraries. However, if GraphicsMagick is built using shared libraries, then all delegate libraries must also be built as shared libraries. Static libraries usually have the extension .a, while shared libraries typically have extensions like .so, .sa, or .dll. Code in shared libraries normally must compiled using a special compiler option to produce Position Independent Code (PIC). The only time this is not necessary is if the platform compiles code as PIC by default.

PIC compilation flags differ from vendor to vendor (gcc's is -fPIC). However, you must compile all shared library source with the same flag (for gcc use -fPIC rather than -fpic). While static libraries are normally created using an archive tool like 'ar', shared libraries are built using special linker or compiler options (e.g. -shared for gcc).

Building shared libraries often requires subtantial hand-editing of Makefiles and is only recommended for those who know what they are doing.

If --enable-shared is not specified, a new PERL interpreter (PerlMagick) is built which is statically linked against the PerlMagick extension. This new interpreter is installed into the same directory as the GraphicsMagick utilities. If --enable-shared is specified, the PerlMagick extension is built as a dynamically loadable object which is loaded into your current PERL interpreter at run-time. Use of dynamically-loaded extensions is preferable over statically linked extensions so --enable-shared should be specified if possible (note that all libraries used with GraphicsMagick must be shared libraries!).

--disable-static

static archive libraries (with extension .a) are not built. If you are building shared libraries, there is little value to building static libraries. Reasons to build static libraries include: 1) they can be easier to debug; 2) the clients do not have external dependencies (i.e. libMagick.so); 3) building PIC versions of the delegate libraries may take additional expertise and effort; 4) you are unable to build shared libraries.

--disable-installed

By default the GraphicsMagick build is configured to formally install into a directory tree. This is the most secure and reliable way to install GraphicsMagick. Specifying --disable-installed configures GraphicsMagick so that it doesn't use hard-coded paths and locates support files by computing an offset path from the executable (or from the location specified by the MAGICK_HOME environment variable. The uninstalled configuration is ideal for binary distributions which are expected to extract and run in any location.

--enable-broken-coders

The implementation of file format support for some formats is incomplete or imperfectly implemented such that file corruption or a security exploit might occur. These formats are not included in the build by default but may be enabled using --enable-broken-coders. The existing implementation may still have value in controlled circumstances so it remains but needs to be enabled. One of the formats currently controlled by this is Adobe Photoshop bitmap format (PSD).

--with-modules

Image coders and process modules are built as loadable modules which are installed under the directory [prefix]/lib/GraphicsMagick-X.X.X/modules-QN (where 'N' equals 8, 16, or 32 depending on the quantum depth) in the subdirectories 'coders' and 'filters' respectively. The modules build option is only available in conjunction with --enable-shared. If --enable-shared is not also specified, then support for building modules is disabled. Note that if --enable-shared is specified, the module loader is active (allowing extending an installed GraphicsMagick by simply copying a module into place) but GraphicsMagick itself is not built using modules.

Use of the modules build is recommended where it is possible to use it. Using modules defers the overhead due to library dependencies (searching the filesystem for libraries, shared library relocations, initialized data, and constructors) until the point the libraries are required to be used to support the file format requested. Traditionally it has been thought that a 'static' program will be more performant than one built with shared libraries, and perhaps this may be true, but building a 'static' GraphicsMagick does not account for the many shared libraries it uses on a typical Unix/Linux system. These shared libraries may impose unexpected overhead. For example, it was recently noted that libxml2 is now often linked with the ICU (international character sets) libraries which are huge C++ libraries consuming almost 30MB of disk space and that simply linking with these libraries causes GraphicsMagick to start up much more slowly. By using the modules build, libxml2 (and therefore the huge ICU C++ libraries) are only loaded in the few cases (e.g. SVG format) where it is needed.

When applications depend on the GraphicsMagick libraries, using the modules build lessens the linkage overhead due to using GraphicsMagick.

--enable-symbol-prefix

The GraphicsMagick libraries may contain symbols which conflict with other libraries. Specifify this option to prefix "Gm" to all library symbols, and use the C pre-processor to allow dependent code to still compile as before.

--enable-magick-compat

Normally GraphicsMagick installs only the 'gm' utility from which all commands may be accessed. Existing packages may be designed to invoke ImageMagick utilities (e.g. "convert"). Specify this option to install ImageMagick utility compatibility links to allow GraphicsMagick to substitute directly for ImageMagick. Take care when selecting this option since if there is an existing ImageMagick installation installed in the same directory, its utilities will be replaced when GraphicsMagick is installed.

--with-quantum-depth

This option allows the user to specify the number of bits to use per pixel quantum (the size of the red, green, blue, and alpha pixel components. When an image file with less depth is read, smaller values are scaled up to this size for processing, and are scaled down from this size when a file with lower depth is written. For example, "--with-quantum-depth=8" builds GraphicsMagick using 8-bit quantums. Most computer display adaptors use 8-bit quantums. Currently supported arguments are 8, 16, or 32. The default is 8. This option is the most important option in determining the overall run-time performance of GraphicsMagick.

The number of bits in a quantum determines how many values it may contain. Each quantum level supports 256 times as many values as the previous level. The following table shows the range available for various quantum sizes.

QuantumDepth	Valid Range (Decimal)	Valid Range (Hex)
8	0-255	00-FF
16	0-65535	0000-FFFF
32	0-4294967295	00000000-FFFFFFFF

Larger pixel quantums cause GraphicsMagick to run more slowly and to require more memory. For example, using sixteen-bit pixel quantums causes GraphicsMagick to run 15% to 50% slower (and take twice as much memory) than when it is built to support eight-bit pixel quantums. Regardless, the GraphicsMagick authors prefer to use sixteen-bit pixel quantums since they support all common image formats and assure that there is no loss of color precision.

The amount of virtual memory consumed by an image can be computed by the equation (QuantumDepth*Rows*Columns*5)/8. This is an important consideration when resources are limited, particularly since processing an image may require several images to be in memory at one time. The following table shows memory consumption values for a 1024x768 image:

QuantumDepth	Virtual Memory
8	3MB
16	8MB
32	15MB

GraphicsMagick performs all image processing computations using floating point or non-lossy integer arithmetic, so results are very accurate. Increasing the quantum storage size decreases the amount of quantization noise (usually not visible at 8 bits) and helps prevent countouring and posterization in the image.

Consider also using the --enable-quantum-library-names configure option so that installed shared libraries include the quantum depth as part of their names so that shared libraries using different quantum depth options may co-exist in the same directory.

--without-magick-plus-plus

Disable building Magick++, the C++ application programming interface to GraphicsMagick. A suitable C++ compiler is required in order to build Magick++. Specify the CXX configure variable to select the C++ compiler to use (default "g++"), and CXXFLAGS to select the desired compiler opimization and debug flags (default "-g -O2"). Antique C++ compilers will normally be rejected by configure tests so specifying this option should only be necessary if Magick++ fails to compile.

--with-frozenpaths

Normally external program names are substituted into the delegates.mgk file without full paths. Specify this option to enable saving full paths to programs using locations determined by configure. This is useful for environments where programs are stored under multiple paths, and users may use different PATH settings than the person who builds GraphicsMagick.

--without-threads

By default, the GraphicsMagick library is compiled to be fully thread safe by using thread APIs to implement required locking. This is intended to allow the GraphicsMagick library to be used by multi-threaded programs using native POSIX threads. If the locking or dependence on thread APIs is undesirable, then specify --without-threads. Testing shows that the overhead from thread safety is virtually unmeasurable so usually there is no reason to disable multi-thread support. While previous versions disabled OpenMP support when this option was supplied, that is no longer the case since then OpenMP locking APIs are used instead.

--disable-largefile

By default, GraphicsMagick is compiled with support for large (> 2GB on a 32-bit CPU) files if the operating system supports large files. Applications which use the GraphicsMagick library might then also need to be compiled to support for large files (operating system dependent). Normally support for large files is a good thing. Only disable this option if there is a need to do so.

--disable-openmp

By default, GraphicsMagick is compiled with support for OpenMP (http://www.openmp.org/) if the compilation environment supports it. OpenMP automatically parallelizes loops across concurrent threads based on instructions in pragmas. OpenMP was introduced in GCC 4.2. OpenMP is a well-established standard and was implemented in some other compilers in the late '90s, long before its appearance in GCC. OpenMP adds additional build and linkage requirements. GraphicsMagick supports OpenMP version 2.0 and later, primarily using features defined by version 2.5, but will be optionally using features from version 3.1 in the future since it is commonly available.

By default, GraphicsMagick enables as many threads as there are CPU cores (or CPU threads). According to the OpenMP standard, the OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable specifies how many threads should be used and GraphicsMagick also honors this request. In order to obtain the best single-user performance, set OMP_NUM_THREADS equal to the number of available CPU cores. On a server with many cores and many programs running at once, there may be benefit to setting OMP_NUM_THREADS to a much smaller value than the number of cores, and sometimes values as low as two (or even one, to disable threading) will offer the best overall system performance. Tuning a large system with OpenMP programs running in parallel (competing for resources) is a complex topic and some research and experimentation may be required in order to find the best parameters.

--enable-openmp-slow

On some systems, memory-bound algorithms run slower (rather than faster) as threads are added via OpenMP. This may be due to CPU cache and memory architecture implementation, or OS thread API implementation. Since it is not known how a system will behave without testing and pre-built binaries need to work well on all systems, these algorithms are now disabled for OpenMP by default. If you are using a well-threaded OS on a CPU with a good high-performance memory architecture, you might consider enabling this option based on experimentation.

--with-perl

Use this option to include PerlMagick in the GraphicsMagick build and test suite. While PerlMagick is always configured by default (PerlMagick/Makefile.PL is generated by the configure script), PerlMagick is no longer installed by GraphicsMagick's ''make install''. The procedure to configure, build, install, and check PerlMagick is described in PerlMagick/README.txt. When using a shared library build of GraphicsMagick, it is necessary to formally install GraphicsMagick prior to building PerlMagick in order to achieve a working PerlMagick since otherwise the wrong GraphicsMagick libraries may be used.

If the argument ''--with-perl=/path/to/perl'' is supplied, then /path/to/perl will be taken as the PERL interpreter to use. This is important in case the 'perl' executable in your PATH is not PERL5, or is not the PERL you want to use. Experience suggests that static PerlMagick builds may not be fully successful (at least for executing the test suite) for Perl versions newer than 5.8.8.

As a convenience, the Makefile targets 'perl-build', 'install-exec-perl', and 'perl-check' are provided. In order to assure that library dependencies and search paths are correct, it is necessary to first install GraphicsMagick via 'make install', then build PerlMagick using 'make perl-build', then install PerlMagick using 'sudo make install-exec-perl', and then 'make perl-check' to make sure that it actually works.

--with-perl-options

The PerlMagick module is normally installed using the Perl interpreter's installation PREFIX, rather than GraphicsMagick's. If GraphicsMagick's installation prefix is not the same as PERL's PREFIX, then you may find that PerlMagick's 'make install' step tries to install into a directory tree that you don't have write permissions to. This is common when PERL is delivered with the operating system or on Internet Service Provider (ISP) web servers. If you want PerlMagick to install elsewhere, then provide a PREFIX option to PERL's configuration step via "--with-perl-options=PREFIX=/some/place". Other options accepted by MakeMaker are 'LIB', 'LIBPERL_A', 'LINKTYPE', and 'OPTIMIZE'. See the ExtUtils::MakeMaker(3) manual page for more information on configuring PERL extensions.

--without-x

By default, GraphicsMagick will use X11 libraries if they are available. When --without-x is specified, use of X11 is disabled. The display, animate, and import sub-commands are not included. The remaining sub-commands have reduced functionality such as no access to X11 fonts (consider using Postscript or TrueType fonts instead).

--with-gs-font-dir

Specify the directory containing the Ghostscript Postscript Type 1 font files (e.g. "n019003l.pfb") also known as the "URW Fonts" so that they can be rendered using the FreeType library. These fonts emulate the standard 35 fonts commonly available on printers supporting Adobe Postscript so they are very useful to have. If the font files are installed using the default Ghostscript installation paths (${prefix}/share/ghostscript/fonts), they should be discovered automatically by configure and specifying this option is not necessary. Specify this option if the Ghostscript fonts fail to be located automatically, or the location needs to be overridden.

The "Ghostscript" fonts (also known as "URW Standard postscript fonts (cyrillicized)") are available from

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gs-fonts/

These fonts may are often available as a package installed by a package manager and installing from a package manager is easier than installing from source:

URW Font Packages

Distribution	Package Name	Fonts Installation Path
Cygwin	urw-base35-fonts	/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts
Debian Linux	fonts-urw-base35	/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts
Gentoo Linux	media-fonts/urw-fonts	/usr/share/fonts/ghostscript
Illumos/pkgsrc	urw-fonts-2.0nb1	/opt/local/share/fonts/urw
NetBSD/pkgsrc	urw-fonts-2.0nb1	/share/fonts/urw
OpenIndiana	gnu-gs-fonts-std	/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts
OS X/Homebrew	font-urw-base35	[ TBD ]
Red Hat Linux	urw-fonts-2.0	/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1
Ubuntu Linux	fonts-urw-base35	/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts

--with-windows-font-dir

Specify the directory containing MS-Windows-compatible fonts. This is not necessary when GraphicsMagick is running under MS-Windows.

--with-tcmalloc

The GNU libc malloc and some other mallocs exhibits poor concurrency in multi-threaded OpenMP programs and this can severely impact OpenMP speedup. The 'tcmalloc' library provided as part of Google gperftools has been observed to perform far better than the default GNU libc memory allocator for multi-threaded use, and also for single-threaded use. Overall benchmark performance improvements of up to a factor of two are observed for some algorithms (even with just 12 cores) and it is expected that the improvements will become much more apparent with larger numbers of cores (e.g. 64 cores). Using tcmalloc may improve performance dramatically for some work-loads on modern multi-core systems.

--with-umem

The default Solaris memory allocator exhibits poor concurrency in multi-threaded programs and this can impact OpenMP speedup under Solaris (and systems derived from it such as Illumos). Use this convenience option to enable use of the umem memory allocation library, which is observed to be more performant in multi-threaded programs. There is a port of umem available for Linux so this option is not specific to Solaris.

--with-mtmalloc

The default Solaris memory allocator exhibits poor concurrency in multi-threaded programs and this can impact OpenMP speedup under Solaris (and systems derived from it such as Illumos). Use this convenience option to enable use of the mtmalloc memory allocation library, which is more performant in multi-threaded programs than the default libc memory allocator, and more performant in multi-threaded programs than umem, but is less memory efficient.

Debian Packages

These packages may be installed on a Debian Linux system (or one that derives from Debian such as Ubuntu or Mint) in order to quickly build a full GraphicsMagick. Most of these are optional depending on the features desired:

gcc (and/or clang), make, libbz2-dev, libfreetype6-dev, libjbig-dev,
liblcms2-dev, liblzma-dev, libpng-dev, libtiff-dev, libtool,
libwebp-dev, libwmf-dev, libx11-dev, libxdmcp-dev, libxext-dev,
libxft-dev, libxml2-dev, libxt-dev, libzstd-dev, zlib1g-dev,
libperl-dev

These additional packages are useful in order to improve the run-time features of the software (and could be installed prior to building GraphicsMagick):

dcraw, fonts-urw-base35, ghostscript, hp2xx,
ttf-mscorefonts-installer

These additional packages are useful in order to maintain GraphicsMagick itself:

autoconf, automake, graphviz, libtool, docutils-common, python, m4

Cross-compilation On Unix/Linux Host

Given a modern and working MinGW32 or mingw-w64 installation, it is easy to cross-compile GraphicsMagick from a Unix-type host to produce Microsoft Windows executables.

This incantation produces a static WIN32 gm.exe executable on an Ubuntu Linux host with the i686-w64 cross-compiler installed:

./configure '--host=i686-w64-mingw32' '--disable-shared'

and this incantation produces a static WIN64 gm.exe executable on an Ubuntu Linux host with the x86_64-w64 cross-compiler installed:

./configure '--host=x86_64-w64-mingw32' '--disable-shared'

For a full-fledged GraphicsMagick program, normally one will want to pre-install or cross-compile the optional libraries that GraphicsMagick may depend on and install them where the cross-compiler will find them, or add extra CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS options so that the compiler searches for header files and libraries in the correct place.

Configuring for building with shared libraries (libGraphicsMagick, libGraphicsMagickWand, and libGraphicsMagick++ DLLs) and modules (coders as DLLs) is also supported by the cross-builds. A cross-built libtool libltdl needs to be built in advance in order to use the --with-modules modules option.

After configuring the software for cross-compilation, the software is built using make as usual and everything should be as with native compilation except that make check is likely not available (testing might be possible on build system via WINE, not currently tested/supported by GraphicsMagick authors).

Use of the DESTDIR approach as described in the Build & Install section is recommended in order to install the build products into a formal directory tree before preparing to copy onto the Windows target system (e.g. by packaging via an installer).