Re: GIF again.....

[wmc(at)bas.ac.uk]

Richard G. French <rfrench@wellesley.edu> wrote:

>JD Smith wrote:
>That imagemagick site looks terrific - thanks for the tip.

>I am happy to discontinue creating gifs, but I have about
>1000 gifs I've made already that I would like to be able to read!

Well, I had the same problem and produced:

PRO READ_GIF, FILE, IMAGE, R, G, B, MULTIPLE=mult, CLOSE=close

; WMC kludge
if (!version.release eq '5.4') then begin
  print,'Version is 5.4 so faking read_gif with png''s'
  base=basename(file)
  spawn,'convert gif:'+file+' png:/tmp/'+base
  image=read_png('/tmp/'+base,r,g,b)
  spawn,'rm /tmp/'+base
  return
endif
; Now continue on into the standard read_gif as written by IDL...

This uses the "convert" program from ImageMagick. Its rather kludgey 
(not even safe for multi-users and will gratuitously fail in 5.5) and
also somewhat slow but works OK for now...

-W.