GIFLIB

Thanks to Spot / Up Rough for the previous port (4.1.6).

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GIFLIB is a package of portable tools and library routines for working with GIF
images.

The Graphics Interchange Format(c) specification is the copyrighted property of
CompuServe Incorporated. GIF(sm) is a service mark property of CompuServe
Incorporated.

This package has been released under an X Consortium-like open-source license.
Use and copy as you see fit. If you make useful changes, add new tools, or find
and fix bugs, please send your mods to the maintainers for general distribution.

The util directory includes programs to clip, rotate, scale, and position GIF
images. These are no replacement for an interactive graphics editor, but they
can be very useful for scripted image generation or transformation.

The library includes program-callable entry points for reading and writing GIF
files, an 8x8 utility font for embedding text in GIFs, and an error handler. GIF
manipulation can be done at a relatively low level by sequential I/O (which
automatically does/undoes image compression) or at a higher level by slurping an
entire GIF into allocated core.

This library speaks both GIF87a and GIF89. The differences between GIF87 and
GIF89 are minor: in the latter, the interpretation of some extension block types
is defined. The library never needs to actually interpret these, but giftext
notices them and there are functions in the API to read and modify them.
Utilities

Here is a summary of the utilities in this package. If you're looking at this
page through a web browser, each utility name should be a hotlink to HTML
documentation.

Most utilities have a -v (verbose) option that will cause them to print the
current input scan line number (counting up) whenever they read image input, and
will print output image line number (counting down) when they dump output.
Utilities that only read or write always print in increasing order.
Conversion Utilities

gif2rgb

    convert images saved as GIF to 24-bit RGB image(s) or vice-versa

Test Pattern Generators

gifbg

    generate a single-color test pattern GIF
gifcolor

    generate color test patterns
gifwedge

    create a test GIF image resembling a color monitor test pattern

Image Manipulation Components

gifclrmp

    modify GIF image colormaps
giffix

    clumsily attempts to fix truncated GIF images

Report Generators

giftext

    print (text only) general information about a GIF
gifhisto

    generate color-frequency histogram from a GIF

GIF Composition Tools

gifbuild

    converter/deconverter to/from an editable text format
gifecho

    generate GIF images out of regular text in 8x8 font
gifinto

    end-of-pipe fitting for GIF-processing pipelines
giftool

    GIF transformation tool

Library Functions

The library contains two groups of C functions. One group does sequential I/O on
the stream-oriented GIF format. The other supports grabbing an entire GIF into
allocated core, operating on it in core, and then writing the modified in-core
GIF out to disk.

Unless you are on extremely memory-limited machine, you probably want to use the
second group.

Detailed documentation on the library entry points is in gif_lib.html.
The GIF Standard

The doc subdirectory includes flat-ASCII descriptions of GIF89 format and
Lempel-Ziv Compression. For historical completeness, we also include a copy of
the GIF87 standard.

You can also read a detailed narrative description of how GIFs are laid out. It
clarifies some points on which the standard is obscure.
Package Status

GIFLIB's current maintainer is Eric S. Raymond. You can find his home page at
http://catb.org/~esr/.

GIFLIB is not under active development, but bug fixes are being accepted.