Re: The GIF format as intellectual property (fwd)

lilley (lilley@afsmail.cern.ch)
Tue, 10 Jan 1995 01:40:57 +0100

Couple more file types I should have included:

-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 331 Jan 9 20:28 reddot.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 1050 Jan 9 21:04 reddot.pcx
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 1100 Jan 9 21:05 reddot.rgb
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 732 Jan 9 21:04 reddot.rle
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 792 Jan 9 21:05 reddot.x
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 1194 Jan 9 21:14 reddot.hdf

That's ZSoft paint PCX, SGI Iris RGB, Utah RLE ( a contender, I forgot),
AVS image format and NCSA hierarchical data format.

Here's the blurb from imconv about rle, from the
University of Utah:
rle Utah Run length encoded image file
Creator: Utah Raster Toolkit, University of Utah
Read support:
8-bit RLE-compressed color index image files, with or without CLT,
with or without 8-bit Alpha plane. 24-bit RGB RLE-compressed image
files, with or without 8-bit Alpha plane.
Write support:
8-bit RLE-compressed color index image files, with or without CLT,
with or without 8-bit Alpha plane. 24-bit RGB RLE-compressed image
files, with or without 8-bit Alpha plane.

And here is the scoop on HDF. Note that Mosaic for X can be compiled to have
inline HDF already. It has supported it for a year or more:

hdf Hierarchical Data File
a.k.a.: df, ncsa
Creator: NCSA
Read support:
8-bit color index images, un- and RLE-compressed. 16-, 24-, and
32-bit color index images, un-compressed. 24-bit RGB, un- and RLE-
compressed, un-, scanline- and plane-interleaved. Raster image
groups as well as older Raster-8 files.
Write support:
8-bit color index images, un- and RLE-compressed. 16-bit color
index images, un-compressed. 24-bit RGB, uncompressed, un-,
scanline- and plane-interleaved. Raster image group and older
Raster-8 tags included.

HDF is not just an image format though. I did notice a second or two delay
converting to hdf, the others were fairly instant.

And, for completeness, the gzipped sizes:

-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 295 Jan 9 20:28 reddot.gif.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 464 Jan 9 21:14 reddot.hdf.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 552 Jan 9 20:31 reddot.lzw.tif.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 538 Jan 9 20:30 reddot.none.tif.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 565 Jan 9 20:31 reddot.packbits.tif.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 314 Jan 9 21:04 reddot.pcx.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 274 Jan 9 20:40 reddot.ppm.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 390 Jan 9 21:05 reddot.rgb.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 410 Jan 9 21:04 reddot.rle.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 lilley users 287 Jan 9 21:05 reddot.x.gz

gzipped ppm still leads on file size, here.

--
Chris Lilley
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