.. This text is in reStucturedText format, so it may look a bit odd.
.. See http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html for details.

==============================
Contributing to GraphicsMagick
==============================

The future and success of GraphicsMagick depends on your contributions.
By contributing to GraphicsMagick you will benefit from the
features/fixes you contribute, can take pride in taking part in the
development of a quality product, and you can tell your friends that you
contribute to the GraphicsMagick project.

There are a number of ways you can contribute:

* Submit bug reports to the GraphicsMagick bug tracking system at
  SourceForge.

* Submit patches to the GraphicsMagick patch submission system at
  SourceForge.

* Perform test builds on unusual systems and report the results.

* Submit ideas and proposed designs to the graphicsmagick-core
  mailing list.

* Create a new language interface, dependent library, or application.

* Join the GraphicsMagick Group as a full-fledged developer with CVS
  commit access.

Regardless of how you choose to contribute, your contributions will be
treated with the respect and value that they deserve.

Becoming a member of the GraphicsMagick Group requires a majority vote
from existing members. Your chances of being admitted to the group are
increased significantly if you have a proven track-record of success on
other open source projects, are a recognized expert in the field, or have
already demonstrated your capabilities and commitment by contributing to
the project in other ways. Please contact Bob Friesenhahn
<bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us> in order to be considered for group
membership.

Areas To Contribute
-------------------

The following are areas where significant contributions may be made to
the GraphicsMagick project:

* Support building and distributing GraphicsMagick RPMs for Linux.

* Act as formal maintainer for the Gentoo Linux GraphicsMagick ebuild so
  that it is added back to Portage. This is not difficult since the
  ebuild has been actively maintained via the Gentoo bug tracking system.
  At the very least, registering a vote for the Gentoo bug may be helpful.
  See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190372.

* Help get GraphicsMagick 1.2.X added to the FreeBSD ports collection.
  Currently GraphicsMagick is stuck at 1.1.X on FreeBSD since KDE and
  other significant software depends on it.

* Set up an FTP mirror site for GraphicsMagick.

* Create a language interface using SWIG <http://www.swig.org/> to
  support scripting in Perl, Python, TCL/TK, Guile, MzScheme, Ruby,
  Java, PHP, and CHICKEN, based on a common implementation.

* Create a new utility command parser based on a separate LALR or
  XML-based syntax definition, and using an approach suitable to
  replace the existing error-prone command parsers in magick/command.c

* Create a vector encoder for EPS, Postscript, PDF, SVG
  <http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/>, Macromedia Flash
  (SWF), WebCGM <http://www.w3.org/Graphics/WebCGM/>, or WMF.

* Create an OpenEXR coder based on the OpenEXR
  <http://www.openexr.org/> library from Industrial Light & Magic.

* Contribute fast and portable 16-bit (Half) and 24-bit floating point
  translation code in (C language) so that GraphicsMagick can support
  these small float samples in TIFF and OpenEXR.

* Create a *pstoedit* module to import Postscript, EPS, and PDF
  files as vector data using pstoedit <http://www.pstoedit.net/> which
  already includes a high-quality driver to render Postscript vectors via
  GraphicsMagick. This module could also export vector data in many
  formats using pstoedit's output drivers.

* Create a coder to support the CALS
  <http://www.fileformat.info/format/cals/> raster file format.

* Work on adding EXIF profile writing support which works for JPEG and
  TIFF formats.

* Add integrated Adobe XMP
  <http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html> profile support for
  TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS, and Postscript.

* Port Erik Reinhard's super-cool Parameter Estimation For
  Photographic Tone Reproduction
  <http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~reinhard/Reinhard02/> algorithm to
  GraphicsMagick.

* Create a replacement (using a portable Widget set such as FLTK) for the
  IMDisplay Windows GUI program and possibly the X11 'display' program.

* Write a shim-layer to allow The GIMP <http://www.gimp.org/> to be
  executed as a loadable process module providing GraphicsMagick
  users with access to GIMP features.

* Port your existing GIMP module to GraphicsMagick as a loadable
  process module.

* Create an interface between GraphicsMagick and OpenOffice.org.
  <http://www.openoffice.org/> so that OpenOffice may load and save
  any format supported by GraphicsMagick. OpenOffice.org offers a
  separate SDK so there may be a number of other opportunities to
  explore.

* Complete the port of ralcgm to Windows so that it may be used as a
  delegate under Windows.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

| Copyright (C) 2002 - 2008 GraphicsMagick Group

This program is covered by multiple licenses, which are described in
Copyright.txt. You should have received a copy of Copyright.txt with this
package; otherwise see http://www.graphicsmagick.org/www/Copyright.html.


