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GIF Support Returns to GD
g_adams27 writes "Legions of geeks and developers owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Boutell and his "gd" library, which powers the drawing and graphic-generating tools used by dozens of open-source projects. And now, with the expiration of the last Unisys patent on the GIF format, support for GIFs has finally been reinserted in gd. The GIF/PNG/MNG wars may continue, but having more options is good!"
var_dump(gd_info());
Some nice soul posted a comment on PHP.net that has what appears to be a great function that does the same thing, but could be used in install scripts and hacked to get it working the way you want:
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I know I didn't.
I bet nobody in Unisys (at least nobody high up) even knew about this happening ... otherwise they would have realized they weren't making money in the last year and put it in the public domain and made a press release etc.
Shows you that a corporation like Unisys isn't dynamic. RSA on the other hand, was making money off their patent and decided that there's value in releasing it into the public domain prior to the patent expiration date.
Beware of Geeks bare in GIF's.
The only thing gif does better than png is animation. Okay, on some rare occasions, gif compresses better. But most of the time, you have no reason to use gif instead of png.
GIFs are great for animations, but I really do prefer PNGs at this point. While it really isn't that big of a deal, PNGs are simply smaller and look better. If we could just get Microsoft to fix Internet Explorer, we'd have a new defacto standard for all non-photographic images.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Can you show me a mainstream, modern browser that doesn't understand both GIF and PNG?
The usual crowd of nincompoop Slashbots are going to crow "They should just leave it out! Everyone should use PNG anyway!!"
... GIF is still the only available option.
Let me answer that in advance by reminding everyone that GIF is a useful format. Everything can read it and display it. It's been around for two decades and is now a completely open and unencumbered standard.
And let's not forget that when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer (shame on you for using Internet Explorer in the first place, but we'll accept that a lot of people still do)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Since it's a duplicate patent and should never have been issued in the first place, IBM would be idiotic to let it get anywhere near a courtroom.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
IE6 botches gamma correction on PNG8 images. Try making a PNG8 file and a GIF filled with #B0B0B0 and place them on a web page with a background colour of #B0B0B0. In IE, The PNG displays as a slightly different shade of grey.
#roses { color: #ff0000; } #violets { color: #0000ff; }
Any browser which doesn't support PNG is also not going to deal well with the rest of basicly all websites, or anything else on the modern internet.
IE displays PNG's properly, with transparency, and it's still non-lossy. IE only doesnt properly support the alpha channel of PNG's.
It's YRO not because GIFs could violate your rights online, but because Unisys, the holder of a submarine patent on GIFs, could. That's one of the main reasons we switched to PNG. Now the patent expired, meaning our rights to use GIFs, without getting the pants sued off us, are back.
Please increase your clue level before posting. The article is correctly filed.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
PHP isn't the only thing to use GD, although I'm guessing it's the most popular one.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I would suspect that camera developers chose JPG because it was a specification from the Joint Photographers Group (hence it's name). If you are going to sell something to photographers, you want to tie it to a standard that photographers are expected to approve of.
Note, I am not saying that it was the best standard to choose, simply that it made sense from a camera developer's standpoint.
I doubt seriously that GIF will be a standard for camra developers to select and store to.
I susect that for the forseable future, uncompressed images will be saved to TIFFs, and compressed (lossy) will be stored as JPG files. How long this status will stay, I can't predict, neither can I predict what standards will take over.
-Rusty
You never know...
[There. That should earn me some karma if the recent Flash flame war is anything to go by.]
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yep, you are wrong.
png uses lossless compresion. It basically is a format for zipped bitmaps.(as far as the compression works, it does a whole bunch of other stuff that bitmaps don't.)
jpeg uses some lossy compression, and then goes ahead ahead and uses lossless on the output of the lossy compression stage. This yields smaller file sizes at a given image resolution(and thus better resolution at similar file size), by sacrificing some amount of quality. The reduction in quality is tunable, and using high quality settings results in images that are fine for most purposes, with the major exception being high quality print.
gif doesn't support color nearly as well as jpeg or png.
Basically, jpeg is 'good enough'(for most people, those that it isn't good enough for use stuff like raw formats or tiff+lzw), and already widely supported/in use.
for more info, check out http://www.photo.net/learn/jpeg/
it is a decent summary of jpeg and the issues involved with its use.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
gd is SLOW when rescaling images. out of all the libs i tested, imlib2 was the fastest by far. imlib2 scales all my images on my personal photo album on-the-fly and the processor usage is never an issue.
Unless you know the business internals and license agreements of those companies, you have no idea whether they respected the patents or not. However, all major graphics program vendors (Adobe, JASC, etc.) have LICENSED the gif compression algorithm, and used it in their programs. Those who paid to use those programs have the right to create gifs.
These commercial softwares did not disrespect "IP-rights," they meticulously followed the law by doing exactly what's required to use the patented algorithm. They showed respect for the patent by paying to use the algorithm. Free software respected the same rights by not using what they hadn't paid to use (because they either couldn't or weren't willing to).
-Dan
PNG doesn't handle photographs well. The compression in PNG comes from the zlib compression library. It is based on detecting repetitive patterns. In a photograph there do not tend to be repetetive patterns, because of the nature of the scene being photographed, and because of noise in the camera's light detecting instrument, which tends to break up any patterns.
PNG has a set of predictive filters which can be applied to an image to attempt to increase the compression effectiveness. However, these are simplistic and are designed to be optimal for non-photographic images.
Looks to me like PNG would typically provide better image resolution for a similar filesize. Maybe I am wrong.
Yeah, wrong, but that's okay :-)
And also, is GIF an option now that it is free again?
No. GIF is an indexed-mode format, and only supports 8-bit palettes. In other words, a GIF can only have 256 colors. Nobody would ever want to store photographs in such a format.
See this portion of the PNG spec. The image resolution is stored in the PNG file as an integer number of pixels per meter.
There are 39.3700787 inches in a meter. Thus, a 300 pixels-per-inch image is 11811.02361 pixels-per-meter. However, the PNG can only store an integer number of pixels per meter. Thus, 11811.02361 gets rounded to 11811.
Convert back to inches. What is 11811 / 39.3700787? Why, it's 299.9994 pixels-per-inch!
That's why 100 pixels per centimeter works perfectly. It's in metric.
Stop using this silly "inch" things, and your problem will vanish.
(a) It was actually only a couple of months after Unisys announced its patent and its intent to enforce, before the PNG format was finalized. It was really an example of lightning-speed format development. google "png history"
(b) the worldwide patents on LZW have not yet expired! It's arguable whether the following patent is valid, but IBM was issued a patent on *the same algorithm* covered by the Unisys patent -- and IBM's patent is good for another two years:
United States Patent No. 4814746 issued in 1989.
PHP supported the use of older GD libraries on Windows, some of which still have the GIF support in them. All PHP had to do was not remove the capability detection they already had.
I used to work for a company named Mastersoft, which was acquired by Frame, the makers of Frame Maker (the now-discontinued DTP app); Frame was subsequently acquired by Adobe.
While at Mastersoft, I developed an implementation of a PNG reading and writing library for use in various file format conversion products; these reading and writing libraries were also licensed to OEMs for inclusion in other commercial products, so they're in a lot of places. The libraries I wrote used Jean-Loup Gailly's (sp?) zlib (since I didn't want to reinvent the wheel and debug a compression library), but did not rely on the pnglib reference implementation in any way.
I was very proud of the fact that my libraries were the first commercial implementation of PNG, as far as I can tell. However, due to time constraints and some performance requirements, the compression done by my PNG writer libraries wasn't the best. Specifically, I avoided using any scanline filter type other than Paeth for my PNG writing library; most modern PNG writers will try all 5 filter types on each scanline, and see which compresses the best. My choice had the virtue of saving time in writing a PNG file to disk, but doesn't necessarily produce the smallest PNG files. I also used a relatively small PNG chunk size; since each chunk has some overhead, more chunks means larger PNG files. Lastly, the version of zlib that I used was current as of the drafting of the original PNG specification; subsequent versions of zlib were released which were slightly more efficient, and a few nasty bugs were stomped out.
I don't know if Adobe is using my PNG writing code in Photoshop, but since Adobe purchased the IP of Mastersoft in the Frame acquisition, it's not inconceivable that they used my code rather than writing their own. If they used my code, then it's quite possible that I'm to blame for Photoshop saving out crappy PNG files that are too big.
In my defense, though, I should say that many people did manage to compress existing GIF files using my PNG library (which shipped as part of the Mastersoft File Utilities by Adobe, a product that unfortunately didn't last long); one magazine reviewer specifically used this software suite to convert a bunch of GIFs to PNGs, and concluded that in most cases, the PNGs were indeed smaller.
As soon as you start dealing with non-indexed color images, though, PNG is no better than TIFF. Some folks might incorrectly try to take a 24-bit source image and save as PNG, then take the same source and save as GIF, and will note that the GIF is way smaller -- as it should be, since GIF doesn't support 24 bpp images, whereas PNG does. To save a 24-bit source image as GIF, you have to first reduce the color space and convert to an indexed color image, since that's the only type of image that GIF can store. With PNG, the bit depth of the original is preserved. (And since PNG supports up to 16 bits per channel, and supports up to four channels -- R, G, B, and Alpha -- you can see how a PNG image can get obscenely large. This is where it pays to manage your expectations and understand the features and limitations of the file format.)
PHP is definitely not the only user of GD. Heck, GD is a C library. There are a lot of C apps out there that use it.
Personally, I've only used GD via perl and the many perl libraries that use it, primarily GD.pm.
.-.--
It's the Joint Photographic Experts Group. There is a fairly large difference between a photographer and a photograph(ic).