Animations with image size matching output resolution

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan, Petr,

I see your names associated with the newly added animate feature of GIF images.  How can I make the following happen?  I'll program gnuplot to behave this way if it seems appropriate.  (But I need to act fast on a decision.)

What I'd like is to create an animation consisting of a series of images, fairly low resolution, say 20 x 20.  Now I've seen a description of how to do this on the Gnuplot web page, i.e., a series of GIF images.  I'd be fine, really, with anything that can be imported into an existing "player" so I can play at a rate that would be real-time speed.

And it would be great if I could generate output images, i.e., GIFs, that are 20 x 20, without any kind of annotation or axis graphics, of course.  That way, it would be a very efficient storage of processed information.

Then I could put a "player" in full screen mode.  (Any suggestions for a GIF animation viewer?  The ones I've tried so far aren't working with the gnuplot output, gthumb, Eye of Gnome... gifsicle prints out info about the animated GIF file that makes sense, but I get
GIF file was missing some data (perhaps it was truncated somehow?) from gthumb.)

So, I have the latest GD library, 2.0.33 and "animate" is activated.  I was hoping the following Octave commands would generate an example of what I want, but it does not work:

graw('unset border\n');
graw('unset tics\n');
graw('unset colorbox\n');
graw('set term gif animate delay 10 nooptimize size 20,20 crop\n');
graw('set output "test.gif"\n');
for i=1:20
    X = floor(rand(20)*64);
    image(X);
end
graw('set output\n');

As you can imagine, all I get are the lower left pixels which happen to be all white.

Basically, cropping is not done as desired, in my opinion.  I know we've talked about this before (regarding PostScript), but as I see it "crop" should mean tight up against the last "non-white" or "opaque" graphic element.

I know this is a bit tricky to define because of line thicknesses and what not.  But in the case of images only, I think the scenario I've described isn't too uncommon for many users who process images and such.  Where would the cropping be done?  Inside the terminal driver, or should there be generic routines for cropping?

Maybe gnuplot isn't the thing to use for such a feature.  Perhaps there is a simpler approach in Octave and some output library.  (Petr, can you think of any?)

Thanks,

Dan