Re: Animating with GD?

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Simon Fredriksson wrote: > Is it possible to create GIF animations using GD? Yes, with patches from: http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/ . -Jaakko Animated GIF output for PHP php-4.3.2-gifanim.diff - patch to php-4.3.2 and php-4.3.3RC1 to implement LZW compressed GIF images and GIF89a animations. Can be used when LZW properly licensed from Unisys or where otherwise legal. For most of the world, the Unisys patent is not valid and for example in the US the patent expired June 20th 2003. The configuration part of the patch might not be as beautiful as it could, I hope someone of the developer could help here. I hope this gets included in future releases of PHP. The patch essentially copies gd_lzw_out.c file from gd1.5.tar.gz to php-4.3.2/ext/gd/libgd/ with minor modifications, and patches other places in php source to include compilation of this file. This patch is based on patches from http://www.rime.com.au/gd/. The animation part of this patch implements three new functions, imagegifanimbegin(), imagegifanimadd(), and imagegifanimend(). With these functions, animated gif images can be created on the fly with php. The documentation for the functions is included in php-doc-anim.diff. Note that the animations are not optimized, as they are written frame by frame to output or files. This is just a fast non-cpu-intensive way of creating animations on the fly. You need to process the resulting file with for example gifsicle if you need optimized files: http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/ . I am in no way promoting GIF format over such superior formats as PNG, MNG or JPEG, but for some todays applications GIF format still has its uses. For example PNG and MNG are not supported in any 3G mobile terminals and GIF89A is the only way to create animations for visually attractive content. Even Mozilla project does not include MNG support for their code by default, so GIF89A is the only option. Note! If you are using mod_perl also with Apache, you must not use the included libgd in php distribution, but you have to configure with external php library, the same one perl GD module uses. Otherwise you will get segmentation faults. Animated gif output for GD-2 gd-2.0.15-gifanim.diff - a patch to GD-2.0.15 to make it read and write gif files and write animated gif files. Ported from PHP changes above. There is no manual, just try to read gd.h. The patch essentially copies files gd_gif_in.c and gd_lzw_out.c from gd1.5.tar.gz with minor modifications to bring the interface up to gd-2 level, and patches gd.h for prototypes and makefile to include compilation of this file. This is based on pathces from http://www.rime.com.au/gd/. Animated gif output for perl GD module GD-2.07-gifanim.diff - a patch to perl module that implements the perl interface to the above patched gd-2.0.15. Even documentation is included this time! -- Foreca Ltd Jaakko.Hyvatti@foreca.com Pursimiehenkatu 29-31 B, FIN-00150 Helsinki, Finland http://www.foreca.com