Complete documentation for CL-GD can be found in the 'doc' directory. CL-GD also supports Nikodemus Siivola's HYPERDOC, see <http://common-lisp.net/project/hyperdoc/> and <http://www.cliki.net/hyperdoc>. 1. Installation (see doc/index.html for Windows instructions) 1.1. Download and install a recent version of GD and its supporting libraries. Please use your operating system's package manager to install the "development" version of the GD library. On Ubuntu Linux, this can be achieved with the command: apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev GD depends on several other libraries to handle different graphics formats. These should be installed by your package manager automatically. If you cannot use or do not have a package manager that includes GD, you'll have to follow the GD installation instructions (http://www.boutell.com/gd/). Note that you won't be able to compile CL-GD unless you have installed all supporting libraries. This is different from using GD directly from C where you only have to install the libraries you intend to use. 1.2. Install cl-gd and its Lisp dependencies using quicklisp (http://quicklisp.org/). 1.3. Compile cl-gd-glue.c into a shared library for your platform. A simple Makefile is included in the cl-gd source directory. For FreeBSD and Linux, just type make For OSX, type make cl-gd-glue.dylib 2. Test CL-GD comes with a simple test suite that can be used to check if it's basically working. Note that this'll only test a subset of CL-GD. To run the tests load CL-GD and then (asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :cl-gd-test) (cl-gd-test:test) If you have the georgiab.ttf TrueType font from Microsoft you can also check the FreeType support of CL-GD with (cl-gd-test:test #p"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/georgiab.ttf") where you should obviously replace the path above with the full path to the font on your machine. (See the note about failed tests in the documentation.)