Transparency... in MS-DOS

How to use transgif with MS-DOS

Jeffrey Friedl wrote a perl script named "transgif" that twiddles the bytes of a GIF to give it a transparent color. Transgif was originally written to run under UNIX, but, according to some experimentation by Michael Spencer, with a few simple changes, it will work under MS-DOS.

Getting transgif

Using transgif

Under MS-DOS, to run the program, you can run a command like this one to run the script. (You should read the beginning of the script for instructions on how to tell transgif which colors to transparentize.) :
perl transgif -1 small.gif > fixed.gif
Jeffrey (the author of the program) wrote documentation for transgif. (In case his web server is unavailable, I made a copy of his documentation.) Alternatively, you can just 'more' the program; it explains itself somewhat. :-)


Please feel free to let me know what you think.

-Eric Mumpower (nocturne@mit.edu)