Re: map2gif option for gstat

["Edzer J. Pebesma" <edzer@pangea.Stanford.EDU>]

Hi Barbara,

There is a problem with writing software that produces
GIF images. If I write such a program and distribute it,
UNISYS can enforce their patent on the format, and enforce
me to get (pay!) a licence for it. That is why gd (Thom Boutell)
and many others want to move from GIF to PNG. On Dec 14, I
announced on this list that upcoming versions of gstat will
only support PNG (i.e., map2png) instead of GIF. The good
news is that PNG is even more compact, and is a much richer
format anyway. The bad news is that today no grown-up animated
PNG exists. I expect this to change pretty fast. (But then, we'll
have to wait until browsers support this...) Anyway, see
http://burnallgifs.org/ for a long discussion.

I'm glad that you rediscovered the GIFmerge location,
I had lost it some time ago. Another program that does this
is gifsicle.

Older versions of the gd library with gif support are
found on the gnuplot sites, for instance
ftp://ftp.ucc.ie/pub/gnuplot/
(versions 1.3 and 1.4 carry the gif code, but use a
non-LZW compression code, which is less efficient than
gd 1.2, but probably less illegal to distribute)

If you want, I can send you an old copy of gd 1.2.

Best regards,
--
Edzer