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RMagick 1.9.1 is now available on RubyForge. This is primarily a bug-fix
release. The most important change is an enhancement suggested by Ara T.
Howard last week, here on comp.lang.ruby. This change enhances the
Image#import_pixels method to accept a buffer of binary pixel data in
the form of a string argument. In this case import_pixels can pass the
pixel data directly to ImageMagick without going through the overhead of
extracting the pixel data from an array of Fixnums.

I have run a benchmark comparison between using an array argument and
using a string argument. I could copy'n'paste the the results here but
it's far simpler just to say that using the string buffer is WAAAYYY
faster. This is a much faster approach for importing pixel data into
very large images. Details on this change are in the import_pixels
documentation bundled with RMagick.

A complete list of all the fixes and enhancements in this release is
available on the RMagick home page: http://rmagick.rubyforge.org.
RMagick 1.9.1 can be downloaded from: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/

RMagick is an interface to the ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org) and
GraphicsMagick (www.graphicsmagick.org) image processing libraries. It
supports more than 90 image formats, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
RMagick now includes RVG, a high-level 2D drawing API based on SVG. The
package includes comprehensive HTML documentation.