Amiga Inc. announces new hardware

[Harrison]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work. Equally exporting from 3D applications in the format is great for Flash and illustrator work.

What else. Well since they purchased Macromedia they attained all of there formats. An application I use a lot is Macromedia Director and the DXR format, also exported as the shockwave dcr format for the web is, while probably not common to many, widely used in the industry. It can be used for completely interactive multimedia presentations, or interactive multimedia such as games, physics based 3D and many more things. Architects use shockwave quite a lot.

Adobe also have a large range of software such as Indesign that is fast becoming the main desktop publishing appication and leaving Quark far behind. It's own file format is therefore becoming more important and other application such as QuarkXpress may soon need to be able to import it (instead of Indesgn importing from quark!).

There are many other examples too.

[Submeg]

Whoa that is quite impressive! Never knew there was that much!

[AlexJ]

The illustrator format .ai is a major format Adobe also control. Many other products can export to the illustrator format which is extremely useful for vector based work. Not sure how the licensing for that format works for third party products using it though. In the past I've had mapping companies supply me with OS maps in ai format which has saved a lot of time and work.

Very true, but there is already an open vector format in SVG (which again is XML-based). Having not used Adobe Illustrator, I can't say by how much .ai is superior to .svg

[Harrison]

That is true. But as with many file formats, illustrator has been around for so long that the file format has a lot of third party support built into many other applications that have equally been around for a long time. And so it's userbase is very large and will be hard to esily replace the format with anything newer.

And this is equally true of many other formats too. Although the move to xml formats is a great idea, to unify standards and try to make everything standardised, I do think the older legacy/proprietary formats originally created for specific applications will remain with us for many years to come and live alongside the newer formats. Too many people are still using specific older software to be able to suddenly abandon them. Just look at the support still built into many applications for ancient formats such as lotus 123 and that hasn't been the standard since the DOS era.

But I am in full support for standardising formats. Having a single file type for each type of data would make life so much easier. Look at bitmap image formats for one. I would like to see png fully replace gif as it can do so much more and always tends to result in smaller file sizes, but png is still not fully supported by all browsers yet (IE) so gif can still not be abandoned. This is equally true of many other formats.

[AlexJ]

Yeah, the ability to read and write legacy formats is important, and as we found recently with the pp compressed files, when you can't easily open old files it's annoying. The move to day-to-day use of the newer formats though will happen at some point, where applications start saving by default in the new format, and many users won't know any different.

[Submeg]

Sure I get your point Harrison, but the thing is there are benefits over certain types. For example, say I was saving an image. Working in paint (of course) I would need to save it as BMP, if I wanted to modify it again, without it going blurry. If I was to stick it staight on the web, I would use JPEG if I was to create an animation file, GIF. But I see what you are saying about PNG....I use that, so much smaller than JPEG and I cant see the difference

[AlexJ]

Sure I get your point Harrison, but the thing is there are benefits over certain types. For example, say I was saving an image. Working in paint (of course) I would need to save it as BMP, if I wanted to modify it again, without it going blurry. If I was to stick it staight on the web, I would use JPEG if I was to create an animation file, GIF. But I see what you are saying about PNG....I use that, so much smaller than JPEG and I cant see the difference

PNG is lossless - it won't lose any quality compared to the original BMP. GIF is also lossless but limited to 256 colours. JPEG on the other hand is lossy.

The basic rule of thumb is PNG for diagrams (which are 'simple' enough for PNG compression to be effective) and JPG for photos (as two pixels are rarely the same in a photograph).

[Submeg]

But if you were to reopen a PNG in paint, would all the pixels have defined colour edges or do the colours blur together?

[Harrison]

But if you were to reopen a PNG in paint, would all the pixels have defined colour edges or do the colours blur together?

It would depend what options you used when saving the images, but if you saved the png in a 256 colour (or less) lossless format then no degradation compression is used and it is very much the same as using a gif, but with smaller file sizes. Each pixel is saved as is.

A lot of the template graphics used on both the forum and the main site are in png format.

[Harrison]

Actually that is a misunderstood thing about PNG. It actually supports both lossless and lossy formats, and allows the saving of up to 256 colour lossless images with transparency, or up to full colour 24bit which can support both lossless and lossy image compression, all within the single format. Therefore it is really the only format that would be needed for anything online if only it was supported by every browser.

The only other formats that are then needed would be the applications own format as this is always required for the original artwork to hold the unflattened version of the original image.

The worst format has to be BMP. It doesn't offer any benefits and the file sizes are huge. BMP is a format I never touch. And TIFF very rarely either unless for print work that requires hires imagery that will be sent to a printing bureau.