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This time I want to present, for the first time, a non-free library for loading and saving images. It is not free, but it’s quite cheap (19.9 USD) and gives you support for almost 20 image formats including tga (targa), ppm (portable pixmap), pgm (portable graymap), pbm (portable bitmap), pfm (portable float map) dds (microsoft’s direct draw surface).

 
The library does not use any command line applications, does not communicate with any Web APIs. You do not have to recompile your PHP and it works under *nix and Windows- you just need PHP 5 with GD.

 
Thanks to this lib you can, for example, convert images to ppm/pgm/pbm and use them with GOCR (a free OCR command-line engine for Windows and Linux) to convert images into text. And how to do this you can read in my other post- here: OCR in PHP.

 
You can get Ziin Image Library here