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# 1. Introduction

This guide explains how to call VIPS functions from C programs. It does not explain how you should write your own image processing functions (See the VIPS Library Programmers' Guide), only how to call the functions that VIPS provides. If you want to call VIPS functions from C++ programs, you can either use the interface described here, or you can try out the much nicer C++ interface described in the VIPS C++ Application Programmers' Guide.

The next chapter introduces the VIPS file format, explaining the types of image which VIPS can manipulate. Chapter 3 describes the VIPS image I/O system, a software layer over the file format which hides most of the details of image input and output from you. Chapter 4 explains the VIPS function dispatch system, a software layer that sits between image processing functions and user interface programs.

See the VIPS Reference Guide for an introduction to the image processing operations available in the standard library. Figure 1.1 tries to show an overview of this structure.

Figure 1.1: VIPS software architecture

VIPS includes a set of UNIX manual pages. Enter (for example):

    example% vips-7.8 man im_extract

to get an explanation of the `im_extract()` function.

All the comand-line version of the vips operations will print help text too. For example:

    example% im_extract

will also give some help.

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