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HTML Production

HTML Graphics

When you look at graphics on the Web, most of the time you will be looking at GIFs. This format, originally the CompuServe Graphic Interchange Format, was developed by CS as a free, public-domain way for people to describe common graphic images. Unfortunately, they did not know that Unisys had silently obtained a patent on one tiny fragment of a compression algorithm used in GIFs, the “W” part of LZW compression. In fact, there was a general belief at that time, supported by the Patent Office decisions, that such an algorithm could not be patented. Unisys had nothing to do with the development of the GIF format itself.

After the GIF format had been in use for a few years, and literally millions of people were using it in the sincere belief that it was free, Unisys announced that it “owned” it all. For a while, it seemed that you would have to pay Unisys to own, or even look at, a GIF. Many people in the industry considered this grand theft. After considerable negotiations, CompuServ claimed that Unisys had agreed to require royalties only from companies that sold software that produced GIFs. In fact, there is good reason to believe that they could not legally ask for any more. Since this affected only a small number of developers, who accepted the hefty (and secret) royalties as a cost of doing business, most people continued using GIFs freely.

After a few years, Unisys reneged on this promise, and demanded a royalty of $5000 to $7500 from anyone who used any GIFs on their Web site. After a loud outcry, they backed off slightly and said this might not apply if you used only GIFs made by software from companies that had licenses from them. But then they said that maybe you’d still have to pay depending on the exact terms of the license with the vendor, and on your usage. And they refused to clarify what those terms were, in direct discussions we had with their General Counsel. So anyone who used GIFs had to be prepared to pay $5K to Unisys, or $25K to a lawyer to fight them, any time they felt like asking. We considered this a serious risk to our customers, and terminated use of them on our Web site, and support for them in Mif2Go. For more info, go here.

Finally, in 2004, their questionable LZW patents expired world-wide. We still boycott Unisys, but we have restored support for GIFs in Mif2Go, and even use some on our site. We may even bundle some graphics conversion support with Mif2Go in the future; before, Unisys’ license terms were prohibitive for this. Even though we considered bundling a product that was *already* licensed by them, fully paid, they wanted some 8% of our corporate gross income (not just of Mif2Go sales!) for the privilege. Yikes.

The second format supported universally by Web browsers is JPEG, or .jpg, which is intended primarily for continuous-tone graphics such as photographs. But it works quite well for all the other sorts of graphics we’ve tried it on too. So JPEG is the main graphic format we support. Some browsers, but not all, support PNG, the format developed in the public domain to replace GIF when Unisys first claimed it. Using our FDK interface and Frame’s internal graphic export filters, you can produce JPEG, PNG, BMP, WMF, TIFF, GIF, EPS, PICT, CGM, or IGES graphics. You can choose the bitmap DPI you want, and the filter produces a graphic for each of your anchored frames.

In HTML, graphics placement works differently than in FrameMaker. Where possible, we emulate the FrameMaker behavior in HTML; we even support runaround graphics that way, and emulate indents using a one-pixel transparent .gif in front of your graphic. But we also permit you to specify the HTML properties you want directly, in the .ini file. You can specify properties for individual graphics, or assign a number of graphics to a “graphic group” and then specify properties for the group, including indent, alignment, and alt tag. You can also specify a graphic of your own to replace the one generated for you by the FDK (to improve resolution if the image will be printed), and use graphic macros before, after, or instead of the graphic.