Licensing options for this format begin with FME Desktop Professional Edition.
The GIF Reader/Writer allows FME to read and write data in GIF format.
Note: The GIF writer writes GIF rasters, not vector features that become rasters.
Overview
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an image format that supports a palette of up to 256 colors in the form of RGB 24 bit. The format also supports gray one-byte continuous images. The format was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has grown to be one of the dominant internet image formats.
Note: Due to patent issues, the FME GIF Reader/Writer does not support LZW compression for GIF writing.
Reader Overview
FME considers a single GIF file to be a dataset. The GIF file contains pixel data, and each pixel in the file is a point in a single FME raster feature.
Writer Overview
The writer creates a single image and draws points, lines, and polygons into it. The file name, window, size, background, color table, transparency, and interlacing of the output image are all determined in the workspace. Each feature written to the image contains special attributes used to determine the appearance of the feature.
Feature types are color entries. The color table entries are defined in the Feature Type dialog:
All features with the specified color name are drawn in that color.
FME Raster Features
FME raster features represent raster data and use several concepts that are unlike those used in the handling of vector data. The topics below describe how FME processes raster data.
GIF files can only be written with square pixel dimensions.
GIF only supports rasters with a single UInt8 band that has a RGB24 palette.