[Image-SIG] PIL Wishlist

[Richard Jones]

Hannu Krosing wrote:
> Could we have compressed GIF's as well ?

   Some correspondence with /F I had once covered this topic. He 
approached Unisys about it. He did not come away with warm fuzzies. In 
fact, there were going to be serious problems licensing a _free_ package 
like PIL. So it's not in there.


> To circumvent the Unisys LZW patent, we could do as xpdf does: 
> unix command compress + some converion code ?
> 
> It would be a little slower, but probably fast enough for most uses.

   I've simply stopped using GIF now in favour of PNG. Unfortunately, the 
PNG implementation in PIL is bare-bones, and I'd remedy that if I had the 
time (which I will do soon, but it's just one thing on a list...). Also, 
the PNG support in WWW browsers is a little bare-bones also --- though it 
_is_ there.

   And with PNG you have license-free compression and a _bundle_ of other 
features GIF probably never even thought of :)


     Richard