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Image processing

Some of the built-in plugins depend on external libraries for efficient image processing, most notably the social plugin to generate social cards, and the optimize plugin for applying image optimization. This guide explains how to install those libraries in different environments.

Dependencies

The libraries for image processing are entirely optional, and only need to be installed if you want to use the social plugin or the optimize plugin. The libraries are listed under the imaging extra:

pip install "mkdocs-material[imaging]"

This will install compatible versions of the following packages:

Cairo Graphics

Cairo Graphics is a graphics library and dependency of Pillow, which Material for MkDocs makes use of for generating social cards and performing image optimization. See the following section which explains how to install Cairo Graphics and its dependencies on your system:

Make sure Homebrew is installed, which is a modern package manager for macOS. Next, use the following command to install all necessary dependencies:

brew install cairo freetype libffi libjpeg libpng zlib

As stated in the installation guide, the easiest way to get up and running with the Cairo Graphics library on Windows is by installing GTK+. You can also download a precompiled GTK runtime.

There are several package managers for Linux with varying availability per distribution. The installation guide explains how to install the Cairo Graphics library for your distribution:

apt-get install libcairo2-dev libfreetype6-dev libffi-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libz-dev

yum install cairo-devel freetype-devel libffi-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel zlib-devel

zypper install cairo-devel freetype-devel libffi-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel zlib-devel

The following environments come with a preinstalled version of Cairo Graphics:

  • No installation needed in Docker image
  • No installation needed in [GitHub Actions] (Ubuntu)

pngquant

pngquant is an excellent library for lossy PNG compression, and a direct dependency of the built-in optimize plugin. See the following section which explains how to install pngquant system:

Make sure Homebrew is installed, which is a modern package manager for macOS. Next, use the following command to install all necessary dependencies:

brew install pngquant

Installing pngquant on Windows is a little more involved. The pngquant-winbuild repository contains a guide on how to set up an environment for building pngquant on Windows.

All popular Linux distributions, regardless of package manager, should allow to install pngquant with the bundled package manager. For example, on Ubuntu, pngquant can be installed with:

apt-get install pngquant

The same is true for yum and zypper.

The following environments come with a preinstalled version of pngquant: