Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Kenneth Evans, Jr." <[email protected]> · Wed, 14 Feb 2001 09:54:56 -0600

     The code for DM2K originally came from MEDM, and I would guess that for
DM did, too.  It was before my time.  Presently, MEDM supports GIF89a
(except for local colormaps) as well as animated GIFs.  You can animate or
pick a frame based on a CALC expression involving up to 4 PVs.  This leads
to a number of creative options, and is more efficient than stacking objects
on top of each other to get special effects such as more than two colors.
(See the MEDM manual for more information.)

     The MEDM GIF code has been extensively rewritten from that in DM2K, but
it could be incorporated with sufficient effort.  To just incorporate GIF89a
support should not be that hard.

     As I mentioned previously, there is an EPICS extension, SGA, to
manipulate animated GIFs on UNIX.  There many WIN32 programs that do this,
as well.  These programs typically do not create the images.  You can create
images with GIMP on UNIX or any number of WIN32 programs, including Paint.
Xv is also useful.  I tend to use Paintshop Pro.

	-Ken

>>
>> The code in xgif.c (dm2k) and dmXgif.c (dm) look amazingly similar.
>> As Deb said, they are undoubtedly from the same source. But the
>> dm2kworks with the new format .GIF.  If someone had the time to play,
>> it looks almost like a slam dunk to move and adapt the dm2k code. I
>> suppose the same could be said for the medm code, but I haven't
>> looked.

>> /Ron Chestnut

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System