Nathanael Nerode writes the following:
The GIF patent means that tools for turning things *into* gifs are pretty
damn hard to find on a Debian system.
I don't believe it's true that GIFs are hard to make (djpeg, ppmtogif, etc.).
They're just not compressed.
But the point is valid anyway. xjig should support more image formats, so you
don't have to make intermediate gifs.
So how about supporting PNG, which isn't that different, but which is much
easier to convert to on Debian systems? :-)
I've made a patch which implements JPEG and PPM support.
Because it was originally designed to work exclusively with GIFs, xjig uses
an internal image representation based on a 256-color palette. I haven't yet
attempted to change that internal representation, so JPEGs and PPMs are
quantized down to 256 colors.
Thanks to libjpeg, quantized JPEGs look good.
Quantized PPMs look horrible, because libnetpbm doesn't include a quantize
routine. I just crammed the colors into 8 bits by using 3 bits red, 3 bits
green, 2 bits blue.
No PNG yet. libpng's documentation is frightening. (And I don't see any
quantize routine in there either.)
The patch is kind of big for a mail message, so find it at
http://world.std.com/~pacman/xjig-beyondgif.diff
The size of the patch includes a lot of chunks that were moved from one file
to another, and a couple of files that were renamed, and some data types
renamed, all of which reflects the fact that there is now a generic
format-independent layer where previously there was just one image loader
which was partly GIF-dependent and partly format-independent. The amount of
new code is actually small.
This patch contains a couple of unrelated build fixes in the Imakefile and
Makefile.Linux. I couldn't get the build to work without these.
Diffed against Debian's version 2.4-8 (what I currently get with apt-get
source xjig), but it also applies to and works with the 2.4 orig.tar.gz. I
have not made any adjustments to the debian/* files. It will at least need
some new Build-Depends (libnetpbm-dev and libjpeg-dev).
Is there any active upstream maintainer for xjig? I'm going to be optimistic
and Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] whose address is in the source (next to some
9-year-old timestamps).
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