[Bug-gnupedia]M$ Word and GIFs

[Tom Chance]

I think we need to sort out at what point we forgo FSF
and GNU's philosophies for the sake of accessibility.
Hector...?

When it comes to images, I think the PNG support is
fine. Opera and IE seem to handle them perfectly well,
though I don't know aout Netscape, Mozilla etc. We
should really use PNGs because although its not an
exclusive policy of GNU, it is one that the whole
community shares. We will also have to allow people to
submit images of all sorts of formats, including GIFs,
because many programs don't support saving images as
PNGs. But we should ask people to save as PNGs,
afterall its just an option in the "Save As" (or
similar) menu!

With Word files, we should ask people to again go to
Save As and save them as pure text. Its not that much
bother to do that with a few files really is it?
Because they'll have to sort out the formatting of
their text anyway to remove things that we won't
display like macros etc. If a University Professor is
that unmotivated that he won't resave them, why is he
bothering in the first place? We're assuming a high
level of stupidity and/or laziness here! And people
are hardly likely to submit a batch of 40 articles,
whichthey'll have to redo individually. It would also
be helpful to distribute a gzip or tarball type
program. But to start with, we shouldn't allow Word
files (as it is the GNU philosophy) and only allow
them if it transpires later on that we really do need
to.

Tom Chance



--- Imran Ghory <address@hidden> wrote: > On 27
Jan 2001, at 17:41, Mike Warren wrote:
> 
> > "Imran Ghory" <address@hidden> writes:
> > > On 27 Jan 2001, at 12:26, Tom Chance wrote:
> > 
> > > > However Unysis can sue us for using GIFs and
> not paying them, or
> > > > giving them royalties, for the use.
> > 
> > > You misunderstand, you can use GIFs on your site
> if the software you
> > > used to create the GIFs is licenced.
> > 
> > No such free software exists, nor can it as long
> as the patent stands.
> 
> IIRC. Unisys do not require licenceing for software
> realesed pre-
> 1995, there must some free (as in beer) for it
> somewhere.
> 
> Also note that while we can convert gif->png we
> can't do png->gif, 
> so if people submit gifs not only will the article
> be readable by a 
> wider audience we can also easily convert them into
> png.
> 
> Incidently has FSF tried asking Unisys/IBM for a
> licence to allow 
> GPLed software to encode gifs ?
> (Especially seeing how much profit IBM have made
> from GPLed 
> software)
> 
> Imran
> 
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