MakeGIF method and .gif file size

[Richard Procter]

(from Help:) The MakeGIF method "...generates an uncompressed GIF representation of a picture from a Bitmap object...Note: Dyadic has chosen to support uncompressed GIF to avoid the legal complexity of dealing with the licensing issues surrounding the compression algorithm which is patented...."

Is this issue still the case? No other software seems to worry about this, afaik.

A direct-from-APL compressed GIF would be a really-nice-to-have...thanks...r

[David Lamkins]

See the final paragraph of this section of the Wikipedia page regarding GIF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_I ... nforcement

I'm not going to argue that that's definitive, but it may be a nudge in the right direction...



Edited to add:

Also, see this footnote:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html#venuenote

(Second link now corrected...)

[JohnD|Dyalog]

Hello Gents,

You are correct, I don't think that there is any legal reason why we shouldn't produced compressed files.

We'd also like to switch to using the built in GDI+ features of Windows to do the conversion. And we're looking into doing this for 14.0 and perhaps 13.2.

Would it cause either of you problems if we just changed the current implementation to produce compressed files?

Best Regards,
John Daintree.

[David Lamkins]

John, it's not an issue for me either way. I was just curious about the patent issue and reported what I found.

(Also, I use Dyalog on Linux.)

[Richard Procter]

Sorry I didn't pick up on this a while ago...
John, we spoke briefly about this at D13.
Yes, I would really like compressed gifs a.s.a.p. Thanks.