Is it not enough that GD support is enabled

Anon

I upgraded to PHP 4.0.2, added the PHP_GD.DLL from http://www.php4win.de, and turned on the extension in php.ini. phpinfo tells me:
GD support enabled
GD version 1.6.2 or higher

But when I run a test with an ImageGIF statement I get the error:
 
Warning: ImageGif: No GIF support in this PHP build in d:/progra~1/apache~1/apache/htdocs/testgd.php on line 20

What's with that?
--David

Anon

Ah, now I see. I changed to ImageJpeg, and it worked as expected. So the Gif support is not turned on in the GD library I got from http://www.php4win.de.

Does anyone know of a source for pre-compiled php_gd.dll for Win32 with gif support?

Anon

Gif is never supported by php_gb.dll after ver1.6.2!!!

Anon

Yes.. those nice people at UniSys instructed the PHP Dev Team to remove GIF support from the PHP GD library.. because the GIF compression standard is copyrighted and the Dev Team hadn't paid for a license. Of course to include a GIF license with every PHP distribution would mean PHP wouldn't be free anymore. So GIF support was dropped in favour of JPEG and PNG.

/Mike

Anon

It was not PHP who dropped GIF, but the boys who make the GD library.

Anon

True enough, my mistake :-)

But the principle of what happened still stands.

Anon

Indeed it still stands!

We are left gifless.

A small price to pay for FREE software :-)

Anon

This page might have a link to where you can download an older version of GD with giff support

http://www.e-gineer.com/instructions/install-gd13-for-php-with-apache-on-linux.phtml

Anon

As mentioned, the licensing issues with gif and unisys have resulted in it being removed from most free applications.

The new alternative to gif format is png format. Png pictures support transparencies, and mng files are the motion containing versions. Png format also support alpha channels (i.e. semi transparency)

Note that most web browsers do not support png transparency or animation, but do support plain png files just fine. I used dynamic png generation for a project a little while back and it worked just fine.

Anon

doesn't the unisys license-fee apply to older libaries too? As far as I'm imformed they are not licensed.