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My personal favourite GIF-related explainer:

* "What's In A GIF": https://www.matthewflickinger.com/lab/whatsinagif/

It's a five part explanation that includes both great visualisations and bespoke analysis tools[2].

Here's a direct link to the section on LZW compression[0]:

* https://www.matthewflickinger.com/lab/whatsinagif/lzw_image_...

[0] Which somewhat confusingly credits "John Barkaus's LZW and GIF Explained" which actually turns out[1] to be... the text of "LZW and GIF explained----Steve Blackstock" via a news group post by John Barkaus (and is the text at OP's HN post URL).

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050217131148/http://www.danbbs....

[2] Including this fantastic example of visualizing individual sections of a multi-part binary file format, the UX/UI of which I think would be a great addition to a "hex viewer" application: https://www.matthewflickinger.com/lab/whatsinagif/gif_explor...




Speak of the devil! I also cited Matthew's specific blog post in my LZW GIF encoder implementation: https://github.com/alexqfredrickson/LzwGifTools


Also, nifty: https://github.com/alexqfredrickson/vcvj :)

(I've done some VJing in my time, so it's always cool to see related projects--I particularly like the effect on the ping-pong ball in the examples with its bounce path trail. :) )


Understandably, it's such a great resource! :)




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