Chafa 1.14.0

This is a feature release with mostly practical improvements and bug fixes. It also adds a modest amount of new API in preparation for things to come.

• Removed ImageMagick loader support. Packagers can now remove this dependency (#157).

• Polite mode is now off by default. The new default eliminates cursor flicker and makes the output more robust against unusual terminal settings. The old behavior can be restored with --polite on.

• Added image loaders for the AVIF and QOI formats. Thanks to @jerch for suggesting the latter.

• sRGB gamma is now handled correctly in scaling operations.

• New option: --passthrough=<auto|none|screen|tmux>. This allows passing graphics protocols like Sixels, iTerm and Kitty through a terminal multiplexer. It will be enabled automatically for Kitty, and can be enabled manually for other protocols with more limited support (#116, #162, thanks to @newyorkthink and @m040601).

• New option: --view-size=<WxH>. Specifies width and height of the viewport, overriding the detected terminal size (#140, reported by @jaminthorns).

• New option: --fit-width. Fits images to the width of the viewport, allowing them to be taller than the viewport's height (#115, thanks to @SuperDuperDeou).

• New option: --relative=<bool>. Enables relative cursor positioning. Useful if you've pre-positioned the cursor at a particular offset where you want frames to appear, but tends to make the output illegible in pagers, e.g. less -R (#146, thanks to @Delgan and @AnonymouX47).

• New option: --exact-size=<auto|on|off>. Preserves the input pixel size when possible. Useful to avoid artifacts caused by resampling (#119, reported by @ErrorNoInternet).

• New symbol selector: imported. This selects glyphs loaded with --glyph-file (#124, reported by @clort81).

• MS Windows: Experimental support for ConHost output (-f conhost). This allows direct output on older versions of MS Windows (#170, @oshaboy).

• Fontgen: Added a BDF font writer (@cdluminate).

• Fontgen: Cleanup and modernization (@cdluminate).

• The help text and manual page were overhauled for readability, and the API documentation now includes symbol indexes by version and deprecation status.

• Added a zsh completion script (@Freed-Wu).

• Installation methods added: Scoop (@LaunchLee) and Winget (@sitiom).

• CI: Ported to GitHub actions (@GuardKenzie).

• Bug fixes:
  #107 "Unknown file format" when using AVIF on stdin (found by @ndren).
  #152 Broken linking with libwebp-1.3.1 (found by @vcunat).
  [unfiled] Fix make check with --without-tools (@sthibaul).
  [unfiled] Fix --duration not working well with still images (@Delgan).
  [unfiled] Fix sixel rendering of animations (@Delgan).
  [unfiled] Fix operator precedence in geometry calculation (@mjunix).

Chafa 1.12.5

This is a bugfix release.

• Bug fixes:
  #123 Crash on canvas created with chafa_canvas_new_similar() (reported by @GuardKenzie).
  #141 Distortion when rowstride is not a multiple of 4 (reported by @jstkdng).
  [unfiled] Missing comma in --help output (reported by @Freed-Wu).

Chafa 1.12.4

This release improves support for Microsoft Windows and fixes several bugs.

• MS Windows: Added support for Unicode command-line arguments.

• MS Windows: Enabled support for building a DLL.

• Improved quality of accelerated symbol picking (the default with -w 6 and lower), especially along sharp edges.

• The XWD loader now supports unaligned image data, which can occur when the header is of an uneven length. Such images will no longer be rejected.

• Bug fixes:
  #100 Reading image data from stdin fails on Windows (reported by @TransparentLC).
  #104 Artifacts with transparent animations on Kitty (reported by @acxz).
  #108 Bad interaction with lolcat (reported by @eMPee584).
  #112 Bad documentation for -c default (reported by @jwilk).
  #113 Autogen/build fails on CentOS 7 (partial solution) (reported by @ivanshatsky).
  huntr.dev: Uncontrolled memory allocation in lodepng (reported by @JieyongMa).
  [unfiled] -lm should not be in pkg-config Libs: list (@kloczek).
  [unfiled] The --watch switch was broken with the introduction of --animate.

Chafa 1.12.3

A bug crept into the previous release that prevented successful package builds in some environments. This has been fixed.

• Increased GLib minimum version to 2.26.
• Enabled a few compiler warnings not included in -Wall -Wextra in order to catch more potential issues early. Also started using -Werror selectively.
• Silenced deprecation warnings for older GLib APIs that we would like to keep using a bit longer.
• Bug fixes:
  #96 Regression: Fails to build on Linux/Debian (reported by @cdluminate).

Chafa 1.12.2

This release adds basic support for Microsoft Windows.

• Made everything compile for the x86_64-w64-mingw32 target using gcc.
• Added support for the Windows 10 Command Prompt.
• Improved error reporting.

Chafa 1.12.1

This release fixes one important input validation bug and several instances of undefined behavior revealed by fuzzing.

• Increased GLib minimum version to 2.20.

• Added 12 new test inputs, including bad inputs to handle gracefully.

• Added a few symbols to API documentation that were accidentally left out.

• Bug fixes:

  • huntr.dev CVE-2022-2061: Out-of-bounds read in libnsgif's lzw_decode() (@sudhackar of CrowdStrike).
  • [unfiled] Undefined behavior in libnsgif due to uninitialized frame fields.
  • [unfiled] Signed integer overflow in chafa_pack_color().
  • [unfiled] Integer overflow in normalization pass on some images.
  • [unfiled] Potential unaligned access with corrupt XWD images.
  • [unfiled] Integer overflow in quantization on some images.
  • [unfiled] Calculating offset from NULL pointer in LodePNG.

Chafa 1.12.0

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.

Chafa 1.10.3

This release fixes multiple input validation issues. These were found in the chafa command-line tool and do not affect the library backend.

• Improved input validation in the XWD loader.

• Bug fixes:
  huntr.dev: Buffer over-read when compiled with -O0 or non-x86 target (reported by @JieyongMa).

Chafa 1.10.2

This release adds security/responsible disclosure guidelines and fixes a few issues with input validation in the chafa command-line tool.

• Added disclosure guidelines in SECURITY.md (suggested by @JamieSlome).

• Bug fixes:

  • huntr.dev: Null pointer dereference in libnsgif with crafted GIF file (reported by @JieyongMa).
  • [unfiled] File magic would not effectively rule out internal loaders.
  • [unfiled] Very big images could cause absurd allocation requests triggering an abort in the loader.

Chafa 1.10.1

This release brings one small but important fix and a few minor corrections to the documentation.

• Bug fixes:
  • #87 Garbled last row of pixels on some images (found by @hydrargyrum).
  • [unfiled] Correctly label new functions since 1.10.