What is ImageMagick, why do I need it and how do I get it

What is it?

ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert, and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF.

PHP, through the Imagick extension, uses its API to create and modify images.

Why do I need it?

Those plugins that have the capability to create PDF files need this PHP module to be installed in your server instance to let the PDF processing library (mPDF or domPDF) tocorrectly process the images when the PDF is generated.

The absence of this PHP module will cause an error on your site and no PDF file will be generated. For this reason, the System Status checker of the YITH plugins will show a warning about this.

(If the PDF generation is a secondary feature of the plugin and you do not plan to use it, you can simply ignore and dismiss the warning.)

How do I get it?

The only way to have it is to contact the technical support of your hosting company and ask them to install it on your site instance.

It may happen that the hosting support could say that the module is already installed although the System Status panel says that it is not installed or outdated. In these cases, this can be easily verified by checking inside the “PHP info” tab of the System Status panel. This tab will show all the data provided by the phpinfo() function provided by PHP, so it is 100% reliable.

There are some plugins, available in the WordPress plugins directory, that add ImageMagick library but, unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that they will work with the PDF libraries mentioned above.