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Review Synopsis:

Gimp.pm was written by Marc Lehmann

Gimp.pm provides Perl interface to all aspects of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. This provides not only for writing GIMP filters, plugins, and extensions, but also for network access to the GIMP.

There are no programming tasks that I enjoy more than those involving Gimp. Whether I'm just writing a one-off thumbnail program on STDIN, or generating dynamic images and special effects, there is nothing that is as flexible.

It does still have a way to go before it is ready for primetime, however. One example is that it is not fully compatible with the strict pragma, generating lots of warnings. Running scripts from apache, this needlessly pollutes the web logs.

The version of Gimp.pm being packaged with the latest GIMP distribution has a number of bugs. One is that Gimp::init() doesn't work as advertised. This forces the use of a callback, that can't return anything. The older versions had cleaner implementations of this feature.

Another bug is that a GIF format file with layer data outside the image borders will cause a GIMP crash, instead of being cropped. This is not consistent with the behavior of the normal GIMP UI.

In addition, the manual has sections marked as "outdated," pointing to other areas of the documentation that don't cover everything marked as outdated. The source is available, but reading it it becomes obvious that the author's primary language is C. I have nothing against C, but in this case I think better documentation is called for.

UPDATE: As of version 1.2, everything is working great excepting the documentation.