Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats: The Complete Reference on CD-ROM with Links to Internet Resources

by James Dickson Murray, William vanRyper

O'Reilly's new edition of the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats is a wonderfully diverse kind of product--it's a book, a CD-ROM, and a World Wide Web product, all in one. You'll find printed information in convenient book form. You'll be able to access text files, images, and code locally on the CD-ROM provided with the book.What's in this product--and why does its book/CD-ROM/online format work so well as a means of presenting information?It's all about graphics file formats. As any graphics programmer or illustrator knows, there are many different file formats used for storing graphics data -- data such as vector graphics, ray tracing, black-and-white photographs, truecolor images, animation data, motion video, and multimedia data. The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats is the definitive reference to all of these formats--from major, standardized formats, like GIF, TIFF, TGA, and BMP, to newer or specialized formats, like PNG, SPIFF, SGI YAODL, and Facesaver. The first edition of the book has already become a classic for programmers on all platforms--Windows, MS-DOS, OS/2, the Macintosh, UNIX, and others.What type of information is available in the book and through its online links?Whether you are a graphics programmer who needs to know the precise contents of every bit in a file, a graphics illustrator who needs to know how to convert a file from one format to another, or anyone else who needs to deal with the low-level technical details of graphics files, this product is for you. For each of more than 100 formats, the product provides quick summary information--How many colors are supported by the format? What type of compression does it use? What's the maximum image size? What's the platform, the numerical format, and the supporting applications? It also provides extensive text detailing how graphics files are constructed in a particular format.In addition to describing the details of the file formats, the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats contains a good deal of general graphics information, The second edition of the book contains hundreds of pages of new content. For example, you'll What will you find on the multiplatform CD-ROM included with the book?First, you'll find file format specifications, a wonderful collection of resources that are often hard to locate and obtain -- in many cases, they have never before been available outside the organizations that developed them. We've assembled original file format specification documents from such vendors as Adobe, Aldus, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Silicon Graphics.Second, we've chosen the best of the free software and shareware--for Windows, MS-DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms--that will let you convert, view, compress, and manipulate graphics files and images.Third, we've included a variety of test graphics images to help you test software, convert formats, compare color depth and file size, and figure out what format is right for your application.Fourth, on the CD-ROM we've retrofitted the entire contents of the book for display on the Internet's World Wide Web.Finally, we've provided tools and links that allow you to access the material efficiently and to keep up to date. Using the Enhanced Mosaic browser (also included), you can browse the book's contents online, look up the details of a file format, access graphics manipulation, and display software quickly.Of course, you'll still get the printed book -- after all, a book is still the most portable resource around -- to take on the train, carry to class, or keep in your library at home or at work.Who needs this book?The first edition of the book was aimed mainly at graphics programmers. With this second edition, we've provided content and tools that will make this product an invaluable resource for graphics illustrators and designers as well. Unlike graphics programmers, these users don't need to know the details of how GIF, TIFF, and PNG files are constructed. However, they do need to make the right choices about which formats can be converted to the formats they or their customers need, which support the color depth they want, and which compress fastest.Whatever your graphics needs, you'll find the new Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats an invaluable aid -- packed with information, constantly up-to-date, and fun to use. We're excited about the information and the tools we've been able to collect, and we look forward to sharing the fruits of our labors with you.Technical requirements for the a CD-ROM drive; a PC running Microsoft Windows 3.1, 95, or NT; and a Macintosh workstation, or a UNIX workstation supported by Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic. A 256-color monitor is highly recommended.

Genres: Reference

1116 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

More valuable as a time capsule than as a reference, even if you're working with old file formats.

In terms of useful information, things are kind of all over the place. The authors are pretty confused about what constitutes a graphics file to them, including besides the obvious raster and vector image formats (including all of the important ones in use today apart from SVG, which was fortunately still some years away, and Google's forced meme) things like scene description formats for 3D generators (e.g. POVray's POV files; here the various contributions by Pixar are noteworthy if not actually interesting—Toy Story came out in 1995, right in between the first and second editions of the book), video formats (e.g. MPEG v1 and 2), and even document layout formats. The technical details of each format vary wildly in level of detail, being anywhere from extremely vague to obnoxiously detailed (e.g. 24 pages are devoted to listing Autodesk 3D Studio chunks), but even the very detailed ones are usually insufficient to implement anything yourself (the list of Autodesk 3D Studio chunks does not include any explanation of what the chunks are for, only their names). Presumably the CD-ROM and the Web resources would help here—they're supposed to contain reference implementations of a lot of the formats—but my second-hand copy of the book didn't include the CD-ROM, and the website is long gone. (At 1,116 pages, I don't feel like expecting full implementation details in the book itself is unreasonable; the authors could have cut down on irrelevant banter to fit more technical detail.)

Before you even get to the graphics file formats themselves, though, there's the 200+-page introductory section, which aims to explain the basic concepts involved in graphics files and veers even more wildly, uncertain if it should be aiming at the level of a person who is confused about what a screen is exactly or at a C programmer writing his own implementation (who is nonetheless confused about how to read data into a struct in the face of data alignment).
The section on compression has ten pages on run-length encoding, compared to nine on LZW, half of which are history and complaints about the patent (the other half do not include sufficient detail to write your own implementation, much less GIF's). This section also includes, bizarrely, the bulk of the discussion of JPEG, and that hits that annoying sweet spot where the text is completely gibberish if you don't already have a solid grounding in the specific jargon, but also just wildly inadequate if you do.
There's a (bad) section on cryptography, which is not used by any of the file formats and seems to be included purely because the author just read an article and got excited about it.

So as a technical reference the book is a clear dud, but as a window into the state of computer software in 1994/1996 it's occasionally delightful.
It predates the common use of the term "thumbnail", instead calling it "postage stamp format". It predates MP3, lamenting that there is no real cross-platform audio format the way there is for graphics (technically it existed by the second edition: WinPlay3, the first realtime MP3 player was released in September 1995, but WinAmp wouldn't show up until 1997). While animated GIFs existed, they were still sufficiently unusual that the authors seem confused as to why anyone would want to store multiple images in a single GIF file.
The first appendix is dedicated to graphics files on the Internet, and it's by far the coziest. Some choice quotes on Internet etiquette:

If you must email a file larger than 64K in size, split it into several smaller parts and email them separately.

(After encoding them with uuencode, of course.)

Do not post more than 400K of articles to the alt.binaries.pictures.* newsgroups a day. [...] Dumping many megabytes of data onto a newsgroup is like trying to pour 100 gallons of water down your kitchen sink. The water will only drain so fast, so it's better just to pour a little at a time.

It's not all about newsgroups, though; there's a bit on FTP archives and Archie search servers, but the authors are quick to tell you "[t]he only medium that is more congenial than FTP and Archie for locating and distributing graphics files is the World Wide Web (WWW)." If this seem exotic to you, a short introduction to the medium is included, and the CD-ROM apparently includes binaries of Mosaic for Windows, Macintosh, and many versions of UNIX should you need them.
They even offer tips for people who would run their own "Web Site":

• If a page's menu selections are graphical, store them in an interlaced format so it may be possible for the user to select menu items before the graphic has completely loaded.

• Access your Web page using a 9600bps link to get a reasonable worst-case access feel of the page. Trim or remove graphics to speed things up.

Unfortunately the many links to newsgroups, FTP servers, and "Web Sites" in the appendix are mostly long gone, but the savvy Internet user of today should have little difficulty locating graphics files on the World Wide Web on their own.

[Jonathanstray Stray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was awesome, before the internet... and it included PNG, which I helped design ;)

[Richard Emmett Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information but a bit dated.