See also Image talk:Pi-unrolled.gif/Gallery Warning: This page will not just load slowly; it may slow down your whole machine while it's open in your browser.
5th revision of this work by my hand; there will not be another
45 frames
diamond marks inserted by find-and-replace graphics -- score another one for Freehand
major changes: baseline dropped 18px, no transition frames from measuring to rolling, distinguished spoke, pi symbol appears at frame 2021, no frames follow rollout
bounds layer (contrary to usual practice) contains visible background; ON for all frames
summary frames:
target frame size 360 x 114 px
for some reason Photoshop rasterizes into oversize windows:
pi = 226.15 px
360 / 114 = 3.158 (put that in your pipe and smoke it)
color issues:
color palette badly controlled in Freehand (operator error); pi = slate gray, baseline and measure circle quiet = black
color palette loaded in Photoshop forcing first 16 values not to include black but resultant GIFs hit the upper end of a full 8-bit palette to set black; must be reduced in GraphicConverter
custom Photoshop palette created in GKON; paper/bounds color also tweaked
no antialiasing OF COURSE
font for pi = Futura Bold (common to several fonts)
Docs gallery:
see Pi-unrolled.gif/marv
Well, I've done it: nominated the new version at FP. Let's make it a good one. John Reid 02:34, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Antialiasing is essentially clever blurring of an image. This is not always wise when presenting a geometric design; it leads to inaccuracy. Antialiasing does not really improve the (generally poor) resolution of your monitor; it just fools your eye into seeing more than there is. Images are always tradeoffs between quality and file size. The latter concern is aggravated by animations, which contain much more information than the equivalently sized static image; this animation contains 45 distinct frames. JPEG photos are handled well by MediaWiki but not animated GIFs. This format depends for small file size on a palette of indexed colors; this particular animation economizes still further by sharing one palette across all frames. The palette is very small: only 8 colors are used, therefore 3 bits are sufficient to specify any pixel. Antialiasing works by blurring the image which creates a range of "in-between" colors. This greatly bloats the color palette. Thus, a fully anti-aliased version might in theory be double in file size. In practice, the penalty is about +50%. This version is already 64 Kb. (John Reid)
Well, the file size penalty is what stopped me. John Reid 06:12, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
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I'm happy to make the entire workfile package available to anybody who wants to build a derivative work on it. On this page you see notes that should be sufficient to duplicate my timing. You also need to get a handle on the cropping issue; it's pretty messy, not suitable for batch processing. You also need to deal with the issue of anti-aliasing blurring sharp, 1px-wide lines. You might touch up each affected frame by hand in Photoshop or you could go back to the FreeHand source and jog the lines around and see if you can get them to fall within pixel boundaries. Finally, if you're going to do it all over again, I'd suggest you might like to do the whole thing at an oversize and really show off the detail and nice-looking "smoothness". Any questions, don't hesitate to ask. John Reid 04:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
John Reid 11:29, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
Question was raised at FP if the big one could be displayed in articlespace. Well, that's the issue with quality; it's expensive. I've got two big, high-res monitors and (mostly) reliable broadband; I'd be happy to see the big one itself illustrating π. I think it's more likely that the watchers of that page will prefer something in the 360px range. Not only does the thumb take up less screen real estate, readers actually download a different file, created and cached by the engine. They never see the big one itself unless they click through to the image description page; even then, only if they've not set a smaller size in Preferences (Limit images on image description pages to...).
Well, I still prefer the un-anti-aliased version; to my eye it looks better. Also, think of the starving children in Africa, staring through smeared Lexan at a kiosk set in the wall of a rusty galvanized steel shack, waiting for the page to come in on a 14.4 baud modem. But I grease the squeaky wheel.... John Reid 19:46, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
The version eventually promoted is uploaded under the distinct pagename Image:Pi-unrolled-720.gif. At the time of this writing, this is the most recent version here, at Image:Pi-unrolled.gif. Useful older versions are re-uploaded under different filenames (see #Versions, above).
Eventually, it will be feasible to link to this image but for the time being, the nasty thumb caching bug warns against it. This seems to take about a week to clear up completely. John Reid 21:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)