On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 11:25:49 -0400, "Fustanella"
wrote:

Except it wouldn't, because then you run into licensing and patent
issues...Which is why most people are switching away from GIFs to JPEGs
and PNGs...Apart from anything else, PDFs tend to scale and print a lot

There's no such issue with GIF any longer. The LZW patent (one of the
compression technologies found in GIF) expired within the last year or so.

This posted just today:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/06/1717243&mode=thread&tid=136&tid=152&tid=155&tid=18 5&tid=187&tid=99

GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM

Twenty years ago, Terry Welch's improvement on Lempel-Ziv compression
appeared in IEEE Computer magazine. The authors of unix 'compress' and
the GIF standard incorporated that algorithm without realizing it was
patent-pending. When the submarine patent surfaced ten years later,
its new owner Unisys intimidated developers and web authors into
moving away from GIFs, inspiring the creation of a better standard,
though sadly still a less popular one. Today, July 7, 2004, Unisys's
last LZW patent (in Canada) expires, leaving GIF once again free...
almost. See, there's the small matter of IBM's patent, granted on the
same algorithm, which is valid for another two years. That still has a
chilling effect on GIF development, though the consensus seems to be
that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring. So how about
it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy
and release that final patent into the public domain?