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InterGif 5.01
=============
by Peter Hartley (K) All Rites Reversed
Desktop front-end adapted from one by Iain Logan
INTERGIF 5.01 is a program for making GIF images from 2-, 4-, 16- or
256-colour RiscOS sprite files, or from Draw files, or from files
produced with Iota Software's (commercial) animation program The
Complete Animator. It can also convert from GIFs back to sprites.
Get the latest version
----------------------
The latest version of InterGif, plus more help information and full
source code, is always available on the World-Wide Web at the address
http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/software/intergif.htm
It's the seventh of February, 1997, as I'm writing these words: if
it's long after that that you're reading them, you might want to see
if there's a later version now available.
Distribution
------------
InterGif is NOT COPYRIGHTED and is NOT distributed under the GNU
General Public Licence. For full information read the file
!InterGif.Copying or go to the Web site.
InterGif is mine: in particular, it doesn't belong to ANT Limited.
If it gets anything wrong, it's my problem, not theirs.
Features
--------
o InterGif runs either on the desktop, or from the command line (so
I can produce the GIFs for my own Web pages, from the sprites
which constitute their source, using a make file!).
o InterGif has options for the transparency and interleaving
features of GIF89a.
o InterGif can take a sprite file (or an Animator file) containing
several frames, and produce from it an animated GIF which Netscape
2.0 or later, MSIE 3.0beta1 or later, or ANT Fresco 1.22 or later
will render as animated if it's inlined in a Web page. The
animation delay can be set individually for each frame, or for the
whole animation.
o InterGif will reduce its input to a smaller number of colours
(unless you explicitly tell it not to) if it can get away with it,
i.e. if only that many of the colours are used anyway.
o It will also compress only the rectangle which has changed on each
frame, so if your animation has a complex but stationary
background, the background will only get compressed once.
Deviousness and cunning are employed to minimise the final size of
the GIF: so much so that many animated GIFs I've found on the Web
have ended up smaller when run through InterGif.
o It can also make GIF images from Draw files. It uses, for this,
the same code that is in my AADraw program (see end), which means
it produces GIFs or sprites with a 216-colour cube palette (as
used on Macintoshes and by Netscape and MSIE for Windows), *not*
the standard Acorn 256-colour palette. (For AADraw connoisseurs,
I'll add that you don't get the -b feature of that program:
InterGif always anti-aliases to white.)
Desktop use
-----------
Pretty straightforward. Run !InterGif; drag your sprite file, Animator
file, or GIF onto the left-hand bit of the window; set any options you
want in the middle bit of the window; and save your GIF or sprite file
out from the right-hand bit of the window. The options are:
o Interlaced
Produce an interlaced GIF: in other words, one which a Web
browser can render quickly at a low resolution, filling in the
details later as they arrive.
o Looping animation
Normally an animated GIF plays through once and stops. If you
tick this option, you'll get an animated GIF that plays over and
over again. This is a Netscape extension to the GIF format, but
hopefully it will become a popular one -- both MSIE and Fresco now
support it too.
o Join input files
This option causes InterGif to look for only one frame in the
file you give it, and then look for the next frame in another file
with the numeric part of the file incremented. For instance, you
could have three files called frame000, frame001, and frame002 and
create an three-frame animation by dragging frame000 onto the
InterGif window and choosing "Join input files".
o Frame delay
This lets you set the frame rate, in centiseconds. The default
is 8 centiseconds per frame (12.5 frames per second). You can
change frame delays individually in Animator files in the usual
way (in Animator, press F7) or in sprite files by giving the
frames sprite names with "delay" in them: for instance, a sprite
called "037delay25" will be given a delay of 25 centiseconds.
(Anything before the word "delay" is ignored.)
o Transparency
Choose None to get a wholly opaque GIF (no masking), Auto to
get InterGif to use the sprites' masks (or the film's background
colour); or you can specify a transparent pixel-value directly.
(Hint: to find out what pixel-value a sprite pixel has, load the
sprite into Paint, ensure its palette window is showing, click
Menu over the pixel you want, and choose "Paint->Select colour".)
o Split output
This splits up the input file into one output file per frame.
Not, I admit, terribly useful, unless you need to import something
into an application that expects lots of one-frame GIFs -- for
instance, Sun's Java Animator applet. The names of the files are
taken from the one you give, with any numeric part incremented as
needed, so if you save a three-frame animation as frame001/gif,
you also get frame002/gif and frame003/gif.
o Web site
Clicking on this button takes you to my Web pages on ANT
Limited's server, as described above. For this to work, you need
to be connected to the Internet, and also have a Web browser
loaded which understands ANT's URL broadcast message -- for
example, Fresco or ArcWeb. (Probably the others too, these days.)
Command-line use
----------------
The !Boot file of !InterGif sets up Alias$intergif, so you no longer
need to copy the intergif file into your library directory.
At its simplest, you can just type intergif and the name of your
sprite or film file, and it'll be converted. Here's a full list of the
options:
intergif [-i] [-loop] [-s ] [-split] [-d cs] [-t [pixel]]
[-o outfile] infile
-i
Produce an interlaced GIF
-loop
Looping animation
-s
Produce a sprite rather than a GIF
-join
Join several input files
-split
One frame per file
-d cs
Frame delay in centiseconds
-t
Use automatic transparency (default is no transparency)
-t pixel
Use specified pixel as transparent
-o outfile
Filename for the output (default is <infile>/gif)
infile
A RiscOS sprite, Draw, Complete Animator or GIF file
See also
--------
The InterGif page
http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/software/intergif.htm
The AADraw page
http://www.ant.co.uk/~peter/software/aadraw.htm
The Complete Animator
http://www.iota.co.uk/animator/
GIF89a specification
http://asterix.seas.upenn.edu/~mayer/lzw_gif/gif89a.html
Animated GIFs for other platforms
http://www.n-vision.com/panda/gifanim/
peter@ant.co.uk
7th February 97