Ping! Another one fully cooked
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 13 Aug 2021 16:21:00 GMT
Portable Network Graphics, with file extension PNG and often pronounced Ping, is a common bitmap graphics format which offers lossless compression for faster transfer over the internet. PNG sits somewhere between Sprite, which is uncompressed, and JPEG used for photos, which uses lossy compression (throwing some information away) to shrink the file even smaller.
What do we gain?
There are two aspects to the new PNG support:
- Being able to save directly from Paint as a PNG graphic
- Being able to convert anything ChangeFSI can open and write it out as a PNG graphic
Underneath this there’s a new support module, called CompressPNG, which does the real work and which other applications will be able to make use of.
If you are a developer and you’d like to add PNG export to one of your own applications it’s simply a case of making a few system calls from whatever language you prefer to use. It’s very similar to the CompressJPEG module which has shipped since RISC OS 3.60, so much so that Paint has also gained the ability to save out as JPEG via that same approach.
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