I've tried to find a simple explanation for several hours but I just can't seem to find anything useful. I'm primarily a Windows programmer with some experience with Linux-based OSes. For some reason doing apt install imagemagick only gives me a really old version (pre-2012) and there's a change in the later versions that I need, which means I need to build from source.
Compiling IM 7 on Ubuntu 18.04 is simple enough: Download tar.gz, extract, ./configure, make and make install. However it seems that PNG support is not included by default (why??).
I've tried doing ./configure --with-png but that didn't achieve anything (I see --with-png=yes no, which presumably means "yes, you've asked for PNG support but no, I haven't given it to you"). I've seen many forum posts and SE questions about this, but everyone asking seems to have some prior knowledge which I am clearly missing and the questions appear to be about some later step in the process.
So, what do I actually need to do to get PNG support?
(And as some bonus questions: Why is there no documentation for this? Why does it not include PNG support out of the box? Why are there no prebuilt binaries for Ubuntu?)
Related question: Imagemagick still exists after apt remove?
