Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats

by James Dickson Murray, William vanRyper

There are many different file formats used for storing graphics data; such data includes vector graphics, ray tracing, black-and-white photographs, truecolor images, animation data, motion video, and multimedia data. The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats covers them all, nearly 100: from major, standardized formats, like GIF, TIFF, TGA, and BMP to newer or specialized formats, like SGI YAODL, Rayshade, and Facesaver. If you are a graphics programmer who needs to know the details of a format (whether it's big- or little-endian, how many colors can be stored, and precisely what data appears in each bit or pixel) or anyone else who needs to deal with the low-level technical details of graphics files, this book is for you.The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats is truly definitive; it's the book that will become a classic for programmers on any platform-- MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX, the Macintosh, and others.In addition to describing the details of the file formats, the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats contains a detailed discussion of graphics concepts and programming, covering such topics as types of graphics data (vector, bitmap, metafile, scene description, animation, multimedia), truecolor, palettes, and color--its perception, conversion, and quantization. It describes in detail different methods of compressing graphics data (e.g., run-length encoding, LZW, CCITT, JPEG) and ways of converting from one type of file format to another. It also includes information on new graphics initiatives, including JPEG (an emerging image data compression standard of particular interest in multimedia technology) and MPEG (a set of digital and audio compression standards for sound and motion picture data).Best of all, this book comes with a CD-ROM on which we've included a collection of resources that are hard for individuals to find (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, along with test images and code examples for many of the formats. Also on the CD-ROM is a set of free or public domain software and shareware--for MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX, and Macintosh platforms--that will let you convert, view, and manipulate graphics files and images.

Genres: Reference

928 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.