OT: GIF Support in GD?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I know this is somewhat off-topic, but a lot of people use the Perl interface to GD, and I'm hoping some of them might be able to answer my question.

How stable is GD's support for GIF at this time? I know it was re-added a little while ago. Is it still a work in progress?

I ask because I wrote a simple C program to read several PNGs in and then assemble a GIf from them, and it failed, leaving only the first frame or not diaplaying anything at all. I tried to make one of the images pallette based and then have the other two use that color pallette, but it doesn't work.

Is GIF support (including animated GIFs) usable at this point? Thanks.

Comment on OT: GIF Support in GD?

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Re: OT: GIF Support in GD? by bart (Canon) on Jan 08, 2005 at 20:35 UTC
GIF support was removed from GD because of the patent and associated licence claims, as a form of protest, and not because it wasn't usable. The patent now has expired, and GIF support has been re-added. There's no way the patent will un-expire, so it'll stay, this time. I have no idea on what you have to do to produce animated GIFs with GD, or if it's even possible.	[reply]
Re^2: OT: GIF Support in GD? by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Jan 08, 2005 at 21:10 UTC
Animated GIF support was added to gd 2.0.29. See its web page for the details. It sounds like the original poster knows what he needs to do but isn't getting the right results. He provided no code however (but isn't even using Perl, so no matter). As for the patent, Boutell says: "The well-known patents on LZW compression held by Unisys have expired in all countries. British Telecom and IBM may hold related patents but have never chosen to require royalties for GIF applications, to the best of my knowledge. I am not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice regarding this issue." -- brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>	[reply]