png-definitive-guide - 20060430-4 main

A free book about the PNG image format.
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This book was published by O'Reilly and it has three parts:
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- Part I, Using PNG, consists of six chapters and covers the main categories
of PNG-supporting applications: image editors, viewers, converters, web
browsers and servers, and 3D apps.
- Part II, The Design of PNG, also consists of six chapters and looks in
more detail at PNG as a file format. It covers not only PNG's fundamental
chunk structure and compression technology but also its history, its
animated cousin MNG, and some of the intricacies of cross-platform gamma
and color correction.
- Part III, Programming with PNG, steps the reader through the design of
three functional demo programs based on the free libpng C library: rpng,
a very simple PNG viewer; rpng2, a progressive PNG viewer such as might be
found in a web browser; and wpng, a basic program to convert RGB image
data from binary PBMPLUS / NetPBM format into PNG format. The final chapter
in this section lists a number of other PNG-supporting programming toolkits
for various languages, including C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, tcl/tk, and
Visual Basic.