🚀 go-pugleaf

 In article <857776608_OASIS_@spirit.demon.co.uk>
  greeny@spirit.demon.co.uk (David Greenhough) said:-

>Now CAB can cope with Gif animations how do you make'm on the Atari to 
>go on our homepages here? I've still got some room left to fill up.
>
>Gifmerge on Cnam seems a tad complicated. Anyone had any success with 
>this or some more friendly utility?

Gifmerge is sort of OK but has its quirks and you have to have the 
right version to get anywhere. I tried several until I found one that 
works. IIRC I got it from the site linked to from the Gifmerge 
homepage (the address is in the docs of the other versions), but it 
wasn't as straightforward as that for two reasons (this information 
describes the situation as at a couple of months ago when I was 
hunting for it - the problems might be fixed now):

1) You need to turn off the pictures in CAB as there's an animation on 
   that page which makes it crash,

2) The link to the Atari version was broken: I ended up entering the 
   URL for the parent directory manually and navigating from there.

Some notes on Gifmerge itself (that version):

1) You can't enter the command line in a standard desktop TTP dialog: 
   it refuses to read it properly and tries to process the > which 
   points to the output file as an input filename. It must be run from 
   a CLI. As I haven't got a CLI for TOS, I ran it from tcsh under 
   MiNT and it worked OK. In fact as it's happiest like this I've 
   treated it as a MiNT program and bunged it in /bin so it's always 
   available from wherever you call it, IYSWIM.

2) It doesn't seem to understand variable delay times between frames 
   (despite what the docs say), so I just stuck to a standard delay 
   and repeated frames where necessary. Not the most efficient way of 
   doing things but at the filesizes I'm working with it's not 
   critical.

3) It hates MagiC. If you run it from the CLI it seems to run if 
   you're lucky but outputs garbage.

M_Player is supposed to work OK and be easier to use but as it barfed 
and crashed when I tried to get it to display the animations I'd done 
with Gifmerge I was put off it somewhat. This was the STE version 2.31 
IIRC, and the Gifmerge animations were fine in CAB and Netscape 3. 
Might be worth persevering with it if you haven't got a MiNT setup 
installed (mine's a hangover from the TAF/Chimera distribution, now 
that takes yer back, doesn't it?) :-)

TTFN
John

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John Whalley             | UMRA: 60/35/3 M B+ G++ ?A L++ I- S- P++ CH0
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