A Developer's Guide To Graphics File Formats

Brendan Daunt and Matt Trask

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GRAPHICS FILE FORMATS by James D. Murray and William vanRyper, O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 1-56592-058-9, $59.95

The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats attempts to lasso the most popular graphics file formats into a concise reference. The fact that it includes a CD-ROM filled with reference material is evidence of just how ambitious this task is. The result is a valuable tool for developers.

It provides just enough technical information to understand graphics file formats on platforms ranging from DOS to Unix. While it discusses some background and theory behind compression methods and design characteristics, it quickly cuts to the chase, outlining the essential header and body structures for each format. Complete specifications obtained from the creators are provided on the CD-ROM. Code samples demonstrate techniques for decoding and manipulating selected formats.

With the abundance of commercial libraries available in this ever-evolving age of multimedia, it's easy to mistakenly regard this book as obsolete. Common wisdom states that it doesn't make sense to spend an inordinate amount of time developing your own filter library when you can simply plug in someone else's and move onto more deserving tasks. However, it's never quite that easy. There's always that one missing format, that one buggy filter, and the risk of relying on an outside source to keep up with new specifications and format upgrades.

Even if you do use third-party libraries, this book's treatment of the Windows Device-Independent Bit Map's palette organization will give you insight into the operation of your selected library. This knowledge will let you implement or tweak a particular filt er with your own preprocessing or postprocessing to achieve the desired result.

The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats contains dozens of insights and tips. It addresses some staple animation and video specifications (e.g., FLI, DVI, and MPEG) and supplies vendor addresses. This book is a must-have reference source for developers of image-based applications.

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Brendan Daunt is the author of Image Commander, a database for storing, managing, and transforming graphical-image files. He is a senior software engineer at and Matt Trask is president of Communica (Cape Cod, MA). Trask can be reached on the Internet or BIX at matt.trask@bix.com .