Cream of the Crop 26/Cream of the Crop 26.iso/image/qpng17e.zip/INSTALL.DAT/GIF2PNG/NOTES.TXT

Text File | 1995-06-13 | 2KB | 35 lines

The following notes are from Oliver Fromme, author of QPV (not of gif2png).

Note that the 286 version works as well as the 386 version, it's just
somewhat slower.  If you use the 286 version, it is strongly recommended to
use a disk cache (for example SmartDrv or HyperDsk) with write-back or
staged-writing feature which greatly enhances the performance of gif2png.

Note that QPV/386 displays PNG files faster than GIF files (this special
PNG-only version can not display GIF files at all).  However, interlaced
PNG files are quite slow (I'll try to improve that), so I recommend not to
use the -i option of gif2png, unless you really need to have interlaced
PNG files.  Also note that interlaced PNG files don't compress as well as
normal PNG files (but still better than GIF in most cases).

Some more words about compression:  I used gif2png on a very large number
of GIF files (several thousands).  The size improvements ranged from 10
to 40 percent, the average improvement was 18 percent (i.e. it saved me
18 Mb of 100 Mb).  I never experienced a lock-up or something like that;
gif2png runs very stable.  All of the resulting images can be read by
QPV/386 without any problems.

I encourage everybody to switch from GIF to the superior PNG format
which has been announced by CompuServe as the official successor of GIF.
Note that PNG does not try to replace JPEG, since JPEG is lossy, and
PNG is not.  Therefore PNG can not compress as well as JPEG, but it is
a hell of a lot better than GIF.  The number of programs that support
the PNG format is growing amazingly fast, and the death of GIF is near.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Oliver Fromme <[e-mail]>

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