In this section, nine articles will demonstrate some of the ways that Perl can be used for graphics programming. By “graphics programming,” I don’t mean graphical applications like those you’d create with Perl/Tk, but rather the creation and manipulation of raw pictures: graphs, logos, art, scenes, and video.

We begin with two articles about graphs: Lincoln Stein’s article demonstrating how to glue the Gnuplot graphing program into a CGI program (Web Plots with Gnuplot), and Jeremy Wadsack’s article (GD-Graph3d) showing how to create threedimensional graphs from your Perl programs using the gd library. Jason Reed follows with an article about how you can use that library to evolve your own images of plants in GD and L-Systems.

Two articles about three-dimensional graphics follow: Alligator Descartes’s OpenGL introduces the OpenGL library and its use from Perl, and Mark Jason Dominus explains a popular rendering technique in Ray Tracing.

The Gimp is a popular image manipulation program similar to Adobe Photoshop, but free. You can create plug-ins for it that enable you to control Gimp from Perl. Aaron Sherman’s article, Perl and the Gimp, shows you how.

Next, Ace Thompson writes about the Perl interface to Glade in Glade. Glade is a graphical interface designer for GTK, a GUI library used by Gnome, one of the two popular graphical user environments on Linux (the other is KDE). Joe Nasal follows with Gnome Panel Applets, which shows you how to create applications that reside on the Gnome panel visible on your desktop.

Finally, Marc Lehmann concludes the section with one of the more bizarre articles ever to appear in TPJ. Marc uses Perl, PDL, the venerable Kermit protocol, an HP-48 calculator, and information extracted from the vertical blanking interval (the horizontal stripe you see when your television is out of sync) to create a Frankenstein system that records television programs appearing at hard-to-predict intervals—kind of a Perl TiVo. His article demonstrates how to frame-grab television in Capturing Video in Real Time.