Subject-Was: Re: [Fractint] Recent FOTD's Richard wrote:
In article <E1QKge0-0006z9-GT@mx03.mta.xmission.com>, Charles Crocker <chasc99@comcast.net> writes:
This may be as good a time as any to raise the question of the relevance of PNG. Now that whatever patents on GIF are obsolete is there any reason for not going back to it?
All the same reasons for adopting PNG over GIF still apply. The patent business wasn't the only thing that made PNG superior to GIF.
Twenty-four bit GIF stll isn't widely portable. For example, PaintShopPro 9.x won't load them or save them. It haz similar problems with SVG, where it doesn't understand changes in the standard or something: I hav tried loading SVG from wikipedia; doesn't work. EPS was more powerful than SVG in 1990 (circa PS level two). And PDF *usually* beats GIF on 256 colour images. I read some nice things about CGM (computer graphics metafiles) in 1990. Unfortunately, I do not think it took off, and I do not know if it even handles 24bit graphics. I know a little about WMF or EMF. I had them work a few times when I wasn't expecting vector in my clipboard from a paste into PSP, which asked me for the resolution to render vector (mostly cubic splines) at. I would hate to write cubic splines (Truetype fonts) by hand. I hav written bezier curves (which go into adobe type one fonts) by hand. PDF beats HTML for handling two major font types, over fourty minor font types, many flavours of vector graphics, JPEG graphics, flate graphics, uh...and if you want to bend the rules (which are dezigned to avoid printer time-outs), you can write fractal code into postscript at device resolution, then convert it to PDF. It has been done. There are some examples with ghostscript. All you need to do to make dynamic PDF (that renders snowflakes as you watch) is skip the "ps2ps.bat" file script. _______ http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/ BrewJay's Babble Bin