Subject: bug#63531: [PATCH] View DICOM and Sixel images using image-convert

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2023 11:36:44 -0700

Antero Mejr via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text
editors" <[email-masked]> writes:

>>> These patches add .dcm and .six to auto-mode-alist, so they can be
>>> viewed with image-convert. The Six patch also adds SIX as an ImageMagick
>>> type.
>>
>> Do we want to include their support in Emacs?  AFAIU, these aren't
>> free formats.
>
> I'm not an lawyer but to the best of my knowledge neither format has any
> sort of licensing, trademark, or patent encumberances.
>
> DICOM is free to implement and view without licenses. The specification
> is available online but the spec itself is copyright of NEMA. It's a
> metadata wrapper over JPEG mainly.
>
> I think the Sixel "format" is more of a simple convention than a formal
> specification with licenses, patents, etc. Implementations use the DEC
> VT330 manual as a "spec" I guess.
>
>> And since supporting them boils down to customizing
>> auto-mode-alist, why cannot users do that themselves?
>
> For usability I think it's good for things to (mostly) work out of the
> box.

Since these formats are not encumbered by patents and so on, I don't see
any reason why we can't support them.  It's always nice if stuff like
that works OOTB.

So I think we should install these patches.