Animated GIF output for PHP/GD

Hi! Some of yo might remember me from php3 times.. I just implemented animated gif output support with the bundled GD library. Patch works with both php-4.3.2 and php-4.3.3RC1. I keep the patch updated at http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/, but hopefully it will get included in PHP at some time. (Please Please Please!) I will be using it in production server soon here. Jaakko ---------- http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/ http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/php-4.3.2-gifanim.diff is a patch to php-4.3.2 and php-4.3.3RC1 to implement LZW compressed GIF images and GIF89a animations. Can be used when LZW properly licensed from Unisys or where otherwise legal. For most of the world, the Unisys patent is not valid and for example in the US the patent expires June 20th 2003. The configuration part of the patch might not be as beautiful as it could, I hope someone of the developer could help here. I hope this gets included in future releases of PHP. The patch essentially copies gd_lzw_out.c file from gd1.5.tar.gz to php-4.3.2/ext/gd/libgd/gd_gif_out.c with minor modifications, and patches other places in php source to include compilation of this file. The animation part of this patch implements three new functions, imagegifanimbegin(), imagegifanimadd(), and imagegifanimend(). With these functions, animated gif images can be created on the fly with php. The documentation for the functions is included in http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/php-doc-anim.diff, which is relative to current phpdoc CVS. The docs need maybe work if they have syntax mistakes but they should include all usage information. The part of patch that only implements GIF output without animatios is http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/sw/php-4.3.2-gif.diff. I am in no way promoting GIF format over such superior formats as PNG, MNG or JPEG, but for some todays applications GIF format still has its uses. For example PNG and MNG are not supported in any 3G mobile terminals and GIF89A is the only way to create animations for visually attractive content. Even Mozilla project does not include MNG support for their code by default any more, so GIF89A is the only option.