<html><head><title>Review of InterGif</title></head><!--(c) G.C. '98 A.R.R.-->
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<center><h3>Review of InterGif</h3></center>
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 There are a fair number of native GIF generators around, including Creator. However, I (and others far, far better acquainted than I with the maintenance of a <a href="../../NetTerms/WWW">web</a> site) have very good reason to conclude that the best around, by perhaps some significant distance, is Peter Hartley's InterGif.
<p>
 When run, although it is a wimp task, InterGif does not give itself an icon bar icon, but merely a window, with space to drag on input files, configure the options and drag off the result. Frankly, I've not yet decided whether this is more annoying than good: it does lead to you having to quit the task, to clear space and, while you could iconise it, you'd then have to iconise or move any other window in the way if you wanted to get it back; on the other hand, it <i>does</i> save precious space on the icon bar, especially if you've got a graphics editor, ChangeFSI, Edit and several more sundry utilities to go with it. Just in case you want to do a batch run of conversions, InterGif provides a command line interface to the software.
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 Of course, most GIF generators support transparent, interlaced and animated forms. However, InterGif gives you the very convenient option of choosing that a transparency generated for an output GIF be either a colour of your own choice, or the mask already present in the source sprite. Source graphics are checked to see how many colours the use, so that 256 colour sprites using only sixty colours will be stored, with a custom-generated palette, with 64 colours, leading to a further quarter reduction in file size. When generating animated GIFs, the source can either be from one sprite file or several and, although you get to choose the frame delay in the options box, a simple editing of the graphic filename allows you to conveniently reset that delay for any frame you like. InterGif's animated GIF outputs, like some movie formats, only compress what changes between two frames and, due to the algorithm used for the compression, animated GIFs the author has found on the internet and passed through his software have sometimes come out smaller; I myself have discovered this to be very true. A problem with InterGif's generation of animated GIFs from a large number of fairly large source files is that the memory it needs becomes huge quite quickly and most of my attempts to make animated GIFs of this sort of size have ended in the software crashing.
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 The feature of InterGif that lifts it above most other GIF generators is its range of source formats: not only can it use sprites to make GIFs, but also files from Iota Software's Complete Animator can be used to make animated GIFs. Best of all, for a lot of people, is that Draw files will also be accepted, trimmed to their smallest borders and converted into GIFs using the so-called <i>netsafe</i> palette, which, unlike the standard RISC OS 256 colour palette, is quite likely to be able to be handled in most 256 colour modes on most platforms.
<p>
 Comprehensive, fast and platform-friendly, InterGif is an essential tool for anyone putting GIF files on the <a href="../../NetTerms/WWW">world wide web</a> for viewing in <a href="../../NetTerms/HTML">HTML</a> pages.
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Author: Peter Hartley<br>
Status: Er... I'm not entirely sure; try PD, with intellecutal rights<br>
Availability: Most PD libraries should have a copy; it can be obtained on <a href="../Commercial/PDCD5">PDCD5</a><br>
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