2. Getting Started

This assumes you have gotten SDL_image and installed it on your system. SDL_image has an README document in the source distribution to help you get it compiled and installed. Well it at least points you to locations for the source code of some of the image libraries SDL_image can use. Most of the other image formats are builtin to SDL_image.

Generally, in UNIX-like environments, installation consists of:

./configure make make install

SDL_image supports loading and decoding images from the following formats:

TGA

TrueVision Targa (MUST have .tga)

BMP

Windows Bitmap(.bmp)

PNM

Portable Anymap (.pnm)
.pbm = Portable BitMap (mono)
.pgm = Portable GreyMap (256 greys)
.ppm = Portable PixMap (full color)

XPM

X11 Pixmap (.xpm) can be #included directly in code
This is NOT the same as XBM(X11 Bitmap) format, which is for monocolor images.

XCF

GIMP native (.xcf) (XCF = eXperimental Computing Facility?)
This format is always changing, and since there's no library supplied by the GIMP project to load XCF, the loader may frequently fail to load much of any image from an XCF file. It's better to load this in GIMP and convert to a better supported image format.

PCX

ZSoft IBM PC Paintbrush (.pcx)

GIF

CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)

JPG

Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format (.jpg or .jpeg)

TIF

Tagged Image File Format (.tif or .tiff)

LBM

Interleaved Bitmap (.lbm or .iff) FORM : ILBM or PBM(packed bitmap)
HAM6, HAM8, and 24bit types are not supported.

PNG

Portable Network Graphics (.png)

You may also want to look at some demonstration code which may be downloaded from:
http://www.jonatkins.org/SDL_image/

2.1 Includes		The include files to use for SDL_image
2.2 Compiling		Using the SDL_image library and header file.