The GD.pm library does what you seem to want, and it doesn't suck. At least as far as I've used it.

You can initialise from PNG, Jpeg, WBMP,GD or XBM formats, for others you might need to shop around the CPAN a bit and see what turns up.

In addition to simple setting of pixels, it also allows you to add text in various orientations, make polygons and draw lines to your heart's content.

For instance, this is a snippet of a script which draws a hexagon:

my @pts = (
         [$x1 + $ba, $y1 - $b1],
         [$x1 - $ba, $y1 - $b1],
         [$x1-2*$ba, $y1      ],
         [$x1 - $ba, $y1 + $b1],
         [$x1 + $ba, $y1 + $b1],
         [$x1+2*$ba, $y1      ],
        );
my $poly = new GD::Polygon;
$poly->addPt(@{$pts[$_]}) for (0..5);
$im->polygon($poly, $cols{BG});
[download]

Please don't blame the wrong people here. ImageMagick is one of the coolest tools around. Yes, compiling it is not always easy, but it is *free*. If you need an installer, build one for yourself. (Hint: Build from source, and build all packages you depend on (all the image libraries) from source. That way, everything will run smoothly, in my experience (all hail configure!). It is the prepacked distribution stuff (rpm and friends), that leaves out headers and documentation and other random stuff, that screws you.)

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

Come on, I admit that I had some troubles installing Image Magick on a Win32 system last week, but it was well worth it. This package can do real wonders once you get used to the lack of documentation on PerlMagick.

GD and PerlMagick have two really different uses. The first is useful for creating graphics from scratch, while the latter provides some powerful photo editing tools.