[TriLUG] creating transparant images on linux

[James Manning]

> HOWEVER, due to the patent restrictions on GIF, this functionality is 
> not turned on in most distributions.  Save to PNG.  It'll do 
> transparency just as well as GIF, but without having to pay license fees 
> to the owner of the GIF/LZW patents.

Just to be clear, you can use GIF's and *not* use LZW compression -
the LZW compression is (well, was) the problem and "libungif" works
great for dealing with gif's with no issues.

Furthermore, the US patent in question expired June 20th, 2003
(<http://rss.com.com/2100-1032_3-1014236.html?type=pt&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news>),
so that's no longer a reason for people in the United States to avoid
GIF's *with* LZW compression.

> size, more colors (gif only supports 256 indexed colors), and is 
> supported in all modern browsers (IE included).

I've heard stories of sketchy IE support of PNG, although I have to
admit my IE 6.x instances haven't given me any problems with png's
that I create with ImageMagick, so maybe that's just a historical
artifact.

Don't get me wrong, I still personally prefer PNG's over GIF's in my
own work, just wanted to make sure the issues were clear :)

James
-- 
James Manning <http://www.sublogic.com/james/>
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