The documentation is found here

The documentation is found here

Heh. That's sort of a sketch of the docs. That's not the real docs. The real docs do not exist. Most of the time, I end up starting from one of the tests in the Perl module distro, and then slowly mutating it to make sure it still works and is still doing what I want it to do.

On a recent 15-line script (to grab the the timestamps from the EXIF data), I ended up having to stare at the C sources for about an hour, and just "try" things repeatedly. I'm no dummy, and it took me that long. Gah.

I'm not sure what it is about image-manipulation software that makes them all: (a) fragile, (b) underdocumented, and (c) hard to install. It's very consistent.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Several modules make this possible. PerlMagick, GD and Imager are some of them. Imager has my preference.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Image::Magick;
#print "Content-type: image/jpg\n\n"; 

my $jpeg_file = 'frontpage.jpg';
my $im = Image::Magick->new();
my $rc = $im->Read($jpeg_file);
 die $rc if $rc;
                       
$rc = $im->Annotate(
     gravity => "Center",
     text => "Hello ImageMagick!",
     font => "arial.ttf",
     stroke => "red",
     fill=> "red",
     pointsize => 28,
);
  die $rc if $rc;

$rc = $im->Write("$0.jpg");
   die $rc if $rc;
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And here is one for GD

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use GD;
use GD::Text::Align;

@ARGV or die "Need an image file\n";

for my $img_file (@ARGV)
{
    my $gd = GD::Image->new($img_file) or die;
    my ($w, $h) = $gd->getBounds();
                        
    my $gdt = GD::Text::Align->new($gd,
       valign => 'bottom',
       halign => 'right',
       text   => 'Some Text',
       colour => $gd->colorResolve(0,0,0),
    ) or die;
    $gdt->set_font('arial', $h/10) or die;
    $gdt->draw($w, $h, 0) or die;

    open(GD, ">$0.png") or die;
    binmode GD;
    print GD $gd->png;
    close GD;
}
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