Nathanael Nerode writes the following: > >The GIF patent means that tools for turning things *into* gifs are pretty >damn hard to find on a Debian system.
I don't believe it's true that GIFs are hard to make (djpeg, ppmtogif, etc.). They're just not compressed. But the point is valid anyway. xjig should support more image formats, so you don't have to make intermediate gifs. > >So how about supporting PNG, which isn't that different, but which is much >easier to convert to on Debian systems? :-) > I've made a patch which implements JPEG and PPM support. Because it was originally designed to work exclusively with GIFs, xjig uses an internal image representation based on a 256-color palette. I haven't yet attempted to change that internal representation, so JPEGs and PPMs are quantized down to 256 colors. Thanks to libjpeg, quantized JPEGs look good. Quantized PPMs look horrible, because libnetpbm doesn't include a quantize routine. I just crammed the colors into 8 bits by using 3 bits red, 3 bits green, 2 bits blue. No PNG yet. libpng's documentation is frightening. (And I don't see any quantize routine in there either.) The patch is kind of big for a mail message, so find it at <http://world.std.com/~pacman/xjig-beyondgif.diff> The size of the patch includes a lot of chunks that were moved from one file to another, and a couple of files that were renamed, and some data types renamed, all of which reflects the fact that there is now a generic format-independent layer where previously there was just one image loader which was partly GIF-dependent and partly format-independent. The amount of new code is actually small. This patch contains a couple of unrelated build fixes in the Imakefile and Makefile.Linux. I couldn't get the build to work without these. Diffed against Debian's version 2.4-8 (what I currently get with apt-get source xjig), but it also applies to and works with the 2.4 orig.tar.gz. I have not made any adjustments to the debian/* files. It will at least need some new Build-Depends (libnetpbm-dev and libjpeg-dev). Is there any active upstream maintainer for xjig? I'm going to be optimistic and Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] whose address is in the source (next to some 9-year-old timestamps). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
