On Sunday, Jun 22, 2003, at 08:11 US/Eastern, Henning Makholm wrote:
But if they are not the preferred form, it is illegal to edit them (at least, it it illegal to distribute the edited gifs). So what's the point of being *able* to do so?
If you merge the layers of an image, then edit pixel-by-pixel the resulting image, the edited version is now the preferred form --- it must be, because it's the ONLY form. No other form contains the same, or substantially same, information.
It's the same thing as if I convert the code from Pacal to C (even automatically), then edit that.
What I can't do is edit the image with layers in xcf, then flatten it and call that source. Or call the unedited assembly output of gcc source.