[Mailman-Developers] GNU GIF problems - was [ANNOUNCE] Mailman 1.0rc1

[Benjamin B. Thomas]

Quoting "Barry A. Warsaw" <bwarsaw@cnri.reston.va.us>:

> Good point.  It's not that hard to convert them to PNGs (or JPEGs?

When saving as JPEG, be sure to play around with the quality setting a little 
bit. Unfortunately, JPEGs tend to smear sharp borders a little bit since the 
compression is lossy. We might get lucky and have this actually enhance the 
"rubber stamp" look of Dragon's logo (It would have been a definite Bad 
Thing(tm) for any of the other possible logos due to their sharp lines). 

I just tried saving the logos as JPEG with XV at 100% quality with 0% smoothing, 
and the results are fairly acceptable. dragonsmall.gif grew by only 200 bytes, 
while dragonlogo.gif grew by about 5K. Take a look at 

http://mail.indiansprings.org/people/benjy/dragonsmall.jpg   and
http://mail.indiansprings.org/people/benjy/dragonlogo.jpg

Use the browser to flip back and forth between the original files to 
compare (they are also at the same location). Use them if you like, or try 
using GIMP or another tool to see if you can get any improvement. 
 
PNG will better preserve the image quality, but there are enough 3.x and early 
4.0 browsers in use that PNG might not be a good choice from an end user point 
of view. Of course, you can always include both versions and let the individual 
webmaster decide if he wants to support non-PNG browsers. The patent problem is 
really too bad, since GIF was the best all around format for these particluar 
images.  

Cheers,
benjy

1975 Cahaba Valley Road                                         (205) 988-4268
Indian Springs, AL 35124                                    benjy@alum.mit.edu