Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!dino!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!phil From: phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: GIF viewers are inconsistent Message-ID: <5300023@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 27 Jun 89 23:25:41 GMT References: <5300015@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Lines: 30 Nf-ID: #R:ux1.cso.uiuc.edu:5300015:ux1.cso.uiuc.edu:5300023:000:1432 Nf-From: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!phil Jun 27 16:26:00 1989 > So, basically, GIF is an inadequate format. Too bad it's so popular. > > So, what does that leave? IFF/ILBM should do a better job, but it's not > popular outside the Amiga. Even as an Amiga owner, I find the IFF documentation to be much harder to read that either GIF or TIFF format documentation. > What about this 'TIFF' format? It currently LACKS the ability to specify a palette. One could, of course convert palette images to plain RGB very easily when converting to the TIFF format. The reverse conversion, however is trickier because it would require the program to verify that not more than the pallatte maximum of different colors is used. Also, if there is any importance to the particular order of the colors in the palette, that is lost, too. I've heard that a future enhancement to TIFF is supposed to include the ability to specify a palette. TIFF does include the possibility of user-agreed and user-defined fields of information that could be used to define a pallatte, as well as any other information desired. Its easy for a program to skip over any data field that it does not understand since everything is addressed relative to the beginning of the file. So the user-defined fields can be ignored by programs that don't know them. I want to encode the coordinates of Mandelbrot images as part of image files, so I could use one of those fields for that. --Phil howard--