NWE Help: Graphics: Gifsicle: Troubleshooting

NWE Home :: Help :: Graphics :: Gifsicle

A typical gifsicle command will return nothing but will create an animated gif.

You should see a "Merging filename.gif" for each image. If you see something different, and the image doesn't appear in your web broswer when you check it, something is wrong. Here are some of the common errors and possible solutions (we've substituted filename.gif in a few places for a bad file name).

error	solution
Can't open filename.gif for reading.	The file isn't in the current directory or is unreadable. Use 'ls' to make sure the file is in the current directory.
EOF in data stream	One of the images you are attempting to merge doesn't follow the GIF spec used by Gifsicle exactly. Open the image in xv, save it as a different name, and try again.
Segmentation fault	One of the images you want to merge may be an unsupported GIF format. Open the image in xv, save it as a different name, and try again.
Gif does not loop	You are not typing an "l" (lower case L) before the loop number, or... Your images are probably too big for Netscape and/or gifsicle to handle. Size them down a bit and try making another gif.
I don't see all the images I want to animate	It's possible that you have given the same image two different names. Open each image in Netscape (type out http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~yourlogin/nameofimage). This is a good way to check that you indeed have several distinct images.

If any of these errors persist, see our instructions for ways you can get more help.