On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 09:13:40PM -0700, Karl Williams wrote: >I would like to mention that there is another format that your organization >might want to take an interest in. It is called ILBM , InterLeaved Bit Map, The perhaps main problem with IFF/ILBM is that it simply isn't widely-supported. The reason people still use GIF is that it is supported in nearly every web browser today. People are (slowly) moving away from GIF, to PNG. I'd suppose PNG has _much_ better compression ratios than IFF/ILBM, simply because computers have become much quicker since the A500 days. >I should mention >the downside, that pictures that I have ported over are 5 bit (32 colors) >converted over to GIF, thats the capacity of ILBMs - becuase of the nature >of the Amiga computer in its low resolution state. The AGA chipset lifted this limitation, BTW. >Becuase I cant use GIF in my own programs becuase of the Unisys licence >problem. I have to develop a program that reads ILBM the format. Its >already >been an undertaking project - so far. I plan to release my libraries as >public domain. While IFF/ILBM format could be useful (especially for interchanging graphics files with the Amiga), I doubt it would be very useful for general use. For that, we already have PNG. GIMP uses a library called libpng (which is free as in GPL'ed), which doesn't have any patent restrictions or royalty fees either. The bottom line: We already have PNG, which supports 8-, 24- and 32-bit modes (alpha), so we would probably not gain anything _big_ by implementing IFF/ILBM. However, nothing is lost either, and I remember looking _very_ hard for such a program a couple of years ago :-) /* Steinar */
