Re: pngquant (Was: amap-align, boxshade and dialign ready for upload?)

["Nelson A. de Oliveira" <naoliv@gmail.com>]

Hi!

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 7:15 AM, Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:
>  > If I did everything correctly, they are ready to be uploaded (and I
>  > will upload them after one more review). Please, see if there is
>  > something that should be changed on them.
>
>  I admit that I currently are not able to check the patches - but I
>  see no reason to distrust you. :)

I was asking because I did it at night (and being a little tired,
something wrong could have been commited).
But they are already there, so too late to blame :-)

>  > About pngquant, there is also pngnq (and optipng and pngcrush), so I
>  > don't think that it's right to have only one and discriminate the
>  > others. They aren't related with debian-med (we can use to have PNG
>  > files optimized, but they aren't specific to medicine,
>  > bio-informatics, etc).
>
>  Well, for some reason pngquant is recommended in imaging.  It should
>  probably be redusced to suggests and thus it will show up on the
>  imaging tasks page anyway.  Well, I admit it is not really specific
>  for medicine, but imagemagic is not as well but should just be installed
>  on a system that is targeting at imaging work.  So what is your opinion:
>  Remove pngquant from imaging task file completely or add the other ones
>  as well.  (If I remember right I prefered it over pngnq and pngcrush
>  and thus added only this one - but this might be wrong.)
>
>  What do you think?

Suggests would be better.
Maybe I didn't explain correctly, but I see no problems in suggesting
(or recommending) graphical programs in our packages. The "problem"
was including pngquant in our SVN (because it isn't related to our
work).

pngquant and pngnq try to do the same thing: reduce the color number
of an image (the final image size is smaller, but it loses some
information)
pngcrush and optipng try to optimize the images, but they do it
losslessly (the images are visually identical, but with smaller size).

So generally we choose one from {pngnq, pngquant} (if it isn't
important to lose some image quality) and/or one from {pngcrush,
optipng} (if image quality is necessary). It's necessary to see  if we
want really small images (but with some quality loss) or if we want
smaller images, but keeping the full quality.
Right? :-)

Best regards,
Nelson