I disagree. "PNG writing is working quite well" just isn't good enough when 
I need some result by a deadline. Give us both formats until we have more 
experience.

If you put the GIF stuff on SM: How long will it remain compatible with the 
main release?

GIF generation is the only reliable way I have found to get stuff out of 
Squeak and into e.g. PowerPoint and FrameMaker. This is essential since I 
want to use Squeak for talks and experiments, and need PP for handouts and 
FrameMaker for books and articles. The 'print PS to file' in the World menu 
is erratic at best.

I would suggest that the World menu should include a reliable export 
facility. E.g. export (gif/eps/png) and then we could work together to get 
all of them into a consistently reliable state.

Cheers
--Trygve

At 20.02.2004 08:26, you wrote:
>Ned Konz <ned at squeakland.org> wrote:
>[SNIP]
> > Now that PNG writing is working quite well, I think that we should 
> remove the
> > generation of compressed GIFs from the distribution version of Squeak
> > (perhaps moving the offending parts to SqueakMap or somewhere else if 
> someone
> > needs to have them).
> >
> > PNG is a better format than GIF in many ways (for instance, supporting 
> gamma,
> > truecolor images, and better compression)
> >
> > All modern browsers support PNG images (and have for some years; see
> > http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html ); if you're writing a web 
> server
> > that must generate GIF images you can either generate uncompressed 
> ones, or
> > go get the replacement code from SqueakMap or wherever it lives.
> >
> > We could still generate uncompressed GIF images (this is what GNU/Linux 
> has
> > done with libungif), or use run-length encoding.
> >
> > I believe that the only impact to code in the image would be the 
> substitution
> > of the non-compressing write logic. However, the Project saving currently
> > saves GIF images (as thumbnails) and for some other forms (in the
> > ResourceCollector); these would probably be better saved as PNG images 
> so we
> > don't lose image information (via JPEG compression or GIF pallette
> > reduction), but we would have to phase this change in for backwards
> > compatibility.
> >
> > Any thoughts on this?
>
>I tend to agree. And just put the GIF stuff on SM.
>
>regards, Göran


-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway