System.Drawing.Common Alternatives (.NET 7 & Non-Windows)

Name: IronOCR
Brand: Iron Software
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January 19, 2022

Updated June 1, 2025

Implementing System.Drawing.Common is not possible on Linux and macOS platforms for .NET 6 and .NET 7.
You will receive an exception message indicating "System.Drawing.Common is not supported on this platform."
Set the System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport runtime configuration to true for .NET 6.
Note that support is no longer available in .NET 7 as well.
Use the IronSoftware.Drawing open-source library to replace System.Drawing.Common for .NET 7.

In .NET 6 and .NET 7, Microsoft has stopped supporting System.Drawing.Common on Linux and macOS. The library will only work on Windows platforms as per the official documentation.

On non-Windows operating systems, a TypeInitializationException is thrown with PlatformNotSupportedException as the inner exception.
In .NET 6, the platform analyzer emits compile-time warnings when code referencing System.Drawing.Common is compiled for non-Windows operating systems. Additionally, the following runtime exception is thrown unless a configuration option is set:

System.TypeInitializationException : The type initializer for 'Gdip' threw an exception. --- System.PlatformNotSupportedException : System.Drawing.Common is not supported on non-Windows platforms.

Temporary Work-around in .NET 6:

Enable support for non-Windows platforms by setting the System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport runtime configuration switch to true in the runtimeconfig.json file:

{
  "runtimeOptions": {
    "configProperties": {
      "System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport": true
    }
  }
}

Add the following code to the beginning of your code to programmatically enable Unix support:

// Enables Unix support for System.Drawing in .NET 6. This setting is ignored in .NET 7.
System.AppContext.SetSwitch("System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport", true);

// Enables Unix support for System.Drawing in .NET 6. This setting is ignored in .NET 7.
System.AppContext.SetSwitch("System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport", true);

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.NET 7

With the release of .NET 7, Microsoft has removed the work-around, completely removing support for System.Drawing.Common on Linux and macOS.

Iron Software has released an open-source replacement for System.Drawing.Common, called IronSoftware.Drawing. You can find it on NuGet and GitHub.

To learn more, you can visit the documentation page: IronSoftware Drawing Documentation