hpjansson/chafa 1.12.0

Chafa 1.12.0

on GitHub

This is a feature release with new image loaders aimed at phasing out ImageMagick. It also has new convenience functions, character art improvements, tests and bug fixes.

Special thanks go to the very fine security researchers at huntr.dev for their help in hardening Chafa over the last few releases.

• The ImageMagick dependency is now optional and deprecated. Packagers are encouraged to drop the ImageMagick dependency (--without-imagemagick) and add direct dependencies on relevant image codecs. ImageMagick support will be removed in a future release.

• Added image loaders for the following formats: JPEG, SVG, TIFF, WebP. Like the existing GIF, PNG and XWD loaders, these are much faster and generally safer than their ImageMagick counterparts. If ImageMagick is enabled, it will be used as a fallback. Supported image loaders will be listed in the --version output.

• Implemented a 16/8 mode producing 8 colors and an additional 8 bright foreground-only colors for a total of 16 foreground and 8 background colors. When using ANSI escape sequences in symbol mode, the sequence for bold text is used to enable bright colors. This scheme corresponds to that of the IBM PC's VGA hardware text modes and was popular with terminal emulators in the late 1980s to early 2000s.

  With a few tweaks, output from this mode can be turned into ANSI art scene .ANS files compatible with utilities like the wonderful Ansilove, e.g:

  $ chafa -f symbols -c 16/8 -s 80 --symbols space+solid+half --fill stipple \
      in.jpg | tr -d '\n' | iconv -c -f utf8 -t cp437 > out.ans
  $ ansilove out.ans -o out.png

• New builtin Latin symbols (available with --symbols latin). This class comprises most of the symbols from the Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A and -B, IPA Extensions and Spacing Modifier Letters plus a few Latin-like symbols from other ranges, using Terminus as the reference font. The ASCII class is also a subset of this class.

• Reworked ASCII symbols to be more representative of modern terminal fonts. As with the other Latin ranges, the reference font is now Terminus.

• New option: --scale <n>. This takes a real number specifying the on-screen scaling factor relative to the input's pixel size, respecting the terminal size. The special argument max will fit the output to the terminal. The defaults are 1.0 for iTerm, Kitty and sixels, and 4.0 for symbols. Suggested by @ploum in #84.

• Deprecated option: --zoom. Use --scale max instead.

• Added a battery of simple tests that can be run with make check.

• Made configure friendlier. It's now more lenient with dependencies, and the summary is more detailed and colorized if possible.

• Bug fixes:

  • #62 Too big alloc on bogus terminal dimensions (reported by @sotpapathe and @cdluminate).
  • huntr.dev: Null pointer dereference caused by calling post_func on unused batch entries (reported by @Han0nly).
  • [unfiled] Small memory leaks when using iTerm and Kitty formats.
  • [unfiled] Wide symbol coverages leaked in symbol map destructor.
  • [unfiled] No error code if files failed to load.