OT: PNG Format

Kind of, but most people won't be able to see it.

There is a spec for an animated PNG format that works like animated GIF. You could have each page appear as one frame of the animated PNG for a set time.

The big problem is that animated PNG isn't very widely supported. IE can't view it and Chrome and Opera need a plugin. The minor problem is that there usually isn't any way for the end user to pause the animation or change the speed; the frames just cycle through at a set timing.

Animated GIF is supported everywhere and might be a better choice, but it has the same problem that the end user can't usually pause it or adjust the timing.

If it has to be an image file format, TIFF can support multiple pages. Browser support varies, and not all software will display all the pages.

Most people will be able to deal with a ZIP file with multiple PNGs (or JPGs or whatever) in it. This may fall foul of some over-zealous firewalls, though.

The "classic" way is probably to create several PNGs and some HTML with links to let the user choose which page they want to see, and then host it somewhere.

The "modern" way might be to include the PNGs in a PDF file. Most PDF creation software has a way to adjust how to treats images when creating the file, so you can avoid having lossy compression.

Matt Roberds

Technically, since PNG is a container format, one could put multiple image packets inside the stream. Likely, almost no software will see or understand anything beyond the first element though.

I've never had a problem with quality, embedding PNG in PDF. File size appears to be a little overhead and that's it; I want to say PDF supports PNG as an internal format, so that should make sense.

pdflatex handles PNG natively. If you aren't in the habit of writing LaTeX yourself, a script could very easily be written to paginate PNGs for you.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website:

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Easy, see my response to your original question.

PNG (Portable Network Graphic) is an *image* format, the copyright/patent-free successor to GIF. Bascially, it's a scheme for lossless image compression.

It can be opened by any browser. A single PNG file can't contain *logical* pages (like a PDF, for instance), just different parts of the image. You navigate to them with your browser just like you'd navigate any image larger than one screen.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v7.60 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator Science with your sound card!

Sure, with the written specs its called "animated png",

Possibly not want you want. Perhaps use pdf instead.

--
umop apisdn 


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

Just to counter the rising tide of disinformation here:

I leave it to you to figure out whether that's any use to you (based on whether your readers will have suitable software).

Personally I convert monochrome images to G4-compressed TIFFs, concatenate them using tiffcp to a multi-page tiff, then use tifftopdf to make a highly-compressed (but pixel-perfect) PDF. All using open source software (netpbm, libtiff-tools).

Clifford Heath.

Noone mentioned mng.

--
umop apisdn 


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

MNG is PNG. It's just a shorthand for Multi-image PNG. As if that wasn't already obvious. I think it's always been a part of the PNG spec.

Ahh, but one beauty of plain vanilla PNG is that all browsers support it, and even Windows Paint allows you to create and manipulate PNG images.

The question is how much of a requirement it is to have the pages as separate entities, versus just making them part of a taller plain PNG image that any user can scroll down to see.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v7.60 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator Science with your sound card!

Wikipedia says not - PNG dates back to 1995, the developers decided

*not* to include multi-image animation support, and the MNG extension work was started somewhat later (MNG spec version 1.0 released in 2001).

Only a subset of PNG-capable browsers and image viewers seem to support MNG.

Have you thought about .cbr or .cbz? It's used for archiving comics. The file itself is just a load of JPEGs, either zipped (.cbz) or RARred (.cbr) together.

The JPEG files should be named in alphabetical order, ie the picture you want to appear first, should have a name that's first alphabetically.

CBR and CBZ readers are available all over the Internet. Might be suitable for your purposes. I've used it as a way of zipping up a load of JPEGs for viewing en-masse later.

To create, you just ZIP / RAR the JPEG files up together into one archive, then change the archive's extension to .cbz or .cbr . Pretty simple! I'm fairly sure it only supports JPEG images, unfortunately, though it wouldn't be a lot to ask for the reader software to support others.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"hey let's educate the brutes, we know we are superior to them anyway, just through genetics, we are gentically superior to the working class. They are a shaved monkey. If we educate them, they will be able to read instructions, turn up on time and man the conveyor belts, sorted." #