I have written over the last two days RB bindings for libgd, in the continous search for a replacement to the Picture object, which is missing in console apps. As long as the promised-and-long-forgotten SwordFish project won’t be released, there’ll be little need, I think, or more accurately little clamoring for a Picture object – but once people start writing web apps in RB, you bet your ass they’ll want to produce images on the fly, like everybody else…
So. GD’s one option I had been thinking about – while still thinking I could build my own. And fPic works well enough, albeit with quirks. And it covers lots of ground – including PDFs, thanks to CoreGraphics. But it’s not very portable – my attempts to make it work on Linux, sans PDF and vImage.framework, failed so far. Since gd works on all platforms, I thought I could try it out. And sure enough it was easy to write bindings to the library, with very few quirks – I am having problems with saving to wbmp format, but who cares about that format anyway? 
One format that’s missing in GD is TIFF – which fPic handles very well, na na na – so I re-read fPics Tiff code [a wrapper to libtiff really] and converted that to RB. Which means I ended up writing bindings to libgd *and* libtiff, oh so much fun! It only reads TIFF files for the moment, as I haven’t worked out how to get access to the int **tpixels array from RB, in order to save as Tiff. Might have to write a small dylib to go with it – or use fPic’s very own manip.dylib!
Like in fPic, when using freetype2 to draw text, one has to pass the path to a .ttf font file. It’s not exactly user-friendly, so I am trying to find a way to provide for a better interface into that. Maybe a Font class that’ll take care of the nitty gritty work. I found a good code sample to retrieve the name of a ttf font. Could be useful…
