Re: IDL 5.4 and gifs

[thompson(at)achilles.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)]

Craig Markwardt <craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu> writes:


>I was visiting someone with IDL 5.4 on Linux today.  I mentioned the
>lack of GIF support, and my friend was surprised.  We confirmed that
>when we tried to open a GIF, we got an error message.  However there
>is an idl_gif.so library file, and WRITE_GIF, READ_GIF, etc still
>exists as procedures in the standard library.

>We tried the simple experiment of replacing the IDL 5.4 idl_gif.so
>library and DLM files with the ones from IDL 5.3.

>It worked!  We were able at least to read old GIFs into IDL with no
>problem.  I didn't try writing any GIFs however.

>Has anybody else tried this and got it to work?  For previous
>purchasers of IDL, this at least is a good sign.  :-)


Apparently this works on some OS's, but not others.  It didn't work on my
Compaq Tru64 workstation, for example.

Of course, if there are any lawyers listening in, you set it right back
to the way it was immediately after the test, right?  ;^]

Bill Thompson