Image patents

[Simon L. Nielsen]

On 2004.04.26 10:05:07 -0700, Linh Pham wrote:
> On 2004-04-26 12:56 +0100, Ceri Davies <ceri at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> # This is really starting to annoy me now.
> # See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040424232421417.

I actually wasn't aware of the JPEG issue.  As matter of principel I
agree it would be a good idea to convert.

> # I'd really like to convert everything in www/en/gifs/ to a .png and
> # commit the diff at http://people.freebsd.org/~ceri/gif_diff.
> #
> # Cons are that we lose animated gifs (such as powerani.gif) and some

I think that's the only one, so I think we can live with loosing that.

> # images with transparency have lost it - see

I'm rather sure .png images support transparency.

> # http://shrike.submonkey.net/~setantae/gifs/ for the old and new, but
> # this is just from a pass through "{jpeg,gif}topnm | pnmtopng" so could
> # possibly be solved.

Hmm, some .png images are much larger than their .jpg counterparts.
E.g. :

 getstarb.jpg            26-Apr-2004 12:24    20k  
 getstarb.png            26-Apr-2004 12:24   171k

That seems a bit exessive, but can hopefully fixed by using another
program for the conversion (or tuning some parameters).

How much space does the .png images use compared to the .gif/.jpg
versions ?

> # Objections, comments, suggestions on how to do it better and offers to
> # do it kindly accepted.
> 
> I definitely agree that the image patents are getting insane and would
> welcome a shift from GIF and JPEG to PNG, though there is still a chunk
> (albeit small, but who knows) of browsers that still do not support PNG
> images.

If a browser doesn't support .png today... well, I can live with not
supporting that browser then :-).

> For animated GIFs, the alternate would be MNG (animated PNGs):
> 
> http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
> 
> Then again, MNG support in browsers pretty much limited to
> Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers, Konquerer (and Safari?), and IE/Netscape
> 4.x via plug-ins.

Hmm, well if it's only the powerani.gif image that needs to be converted
then it sounds like MNG is better than nothing.

> I took a look at your diff file and snickered at the fact that the
> directory names are still "gifs/". Maybe it's a chance to re-name it to
> "img/" and drop the different image formats into their own
> sub-directory? Of course doing that would probably wreak havoc on CVS,
> which I don't think the maintainers like :\

At first I though it would be a bad idea to rename the diretory... but
the I had a look at the content of the diretory :

[simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck . | tail -n 1
3680    total
[simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck *.jpg *.gif | tail -n 1
3256    total
[simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck *.png | tail -n 1
250     total

So it's the main part of the directory that needs to be replaced anyway,
so it wouldn't really hurt much (in wasted repository space) to rename
the directory at the same time as we convert the images.  So, I'm also
for renaming the directory and 'img' seems as good a name as any to me.

-- 
Simon L. Nielsen
FreeBSD Documentation Team
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