Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2886 mails)

[pinard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (François Pinard)]

[Landy Roman]

> can gimp be used to convert a jpg to gif?  if not what tool is outthere
> that can do it

As others replied already, you might consider `.png' instead of `.gif'.

Besides `gimp', which can convert between many formats, I used `convert'
from ImageMagick, a combination of tools from `PBMplus', and the `pilfile'
utility that comes with the Python Imaging Library.

Even if some of the above can produce `.gif' files, they might not produce
them in compressed form (as this is not legal to do so, because of patent
problems), so the produced `.gif' are not always the best you could hope.
I think I vaguely remember having produced `gif' through ImageMagick,
and later compressed them through PBMplus, but this was many years ago.

Today, I just never produce `.gif', and use `.png' as a portable format.
I much appreciate `.png' because it can conveys 8-bit alpha channels (while
`.gif' are limited to 1-bit alpha channels - which is rather rough for
an approximation).

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard