[lug] The GIMP

[D. Stimits]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> 
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> On Wednesday 19 June 2002 03:57 pm, j davis wrote:
> > hello,
> >   I made buttons for my home page and cant figure out how to save as a
> > giff...
> > my buttons have transparent parts.....any way so i save as png...looks
> > great with
> > mozilla but everything else shows the trasparent parts as white...getting
> > to point..
> > with the gimp under rh7.3 i cant seem to save anything as a giff...option
> > is greyed out, even if image is flat. What am i doing wrong?
> 
> Have you tried a newer version of the GIMP?  Older versions don't have GIF
> support for legal reasons.

I've found a number of libraries and programs will fail silently, not so
much due to gif missing, but the compression algo itself being removed
for legal reasons. I think there is a separate download now of the
compression/gif module or code or library (I forget which, it has been a
while), in which they have a little disclaimer saying it is up to you to
be sure you can legally use it. Wish I could remember where I saw this,
but I ran into it in two cases, one when looking for gimp for windows,
another with a friend's image viewing program (iv).

> 
> AFAIK the patents in question have expired, so I would suppose that new
> versions of the GIMP would support GIF, but I haven't checked.

Do you mean the patents on compression? I was under the impression that
gif itself was not patented, that it was the compression. Maybe it was
the zlib package that had the form of compression removed, I can't
remember where it was.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> Also, have you reported the "white background" bug to your browser vendor(s)?
> I understand that this wouldn't be a unique report, but the squeaky wheel
> gets the grease.
> 
> - -Peter
> 
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