Re:Image file formats that didn’t make it
by NelsonMinar on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @05:55PM
(#29182103)
I was kind of hoping to see PNM referenced here. That's the very simple format that comes in PBM, PGM, and PPM files made popular by Jef Poskanzer's PBMPlus (and later, NetPBM).
The core insight was great: have one generic lossless simple raster format and make lots of command line image processing tools for it. Then have a bunch of converters. For many years I got a lot of work out of things like xpmtoppm icon.xpm | pnmscale 3 | ppmtogif > icon-big.gif. It helped the format was so simple you could easily create images in C code, too. (These days we use Imagemagick or derivates instead.)
One interesting thing about PNM is very few images were ever stored in that format itself. It was intended mostly as an intermediate format for process.
The core insight was great: have one generic lossless simple raster format and make lots of command line image processing tools for it. Then have a bunch of converters. For many years I got a lot of work out of things like xpmtoppm icon.xpm | pnmscale 3 | ppmtogif > icon-big.gif. It helped the format was so simple you could easily create images in C code, too. (These days we use Imagemagick or derivates instead.)
One interesting thing about PNM is very few images were ever stored in that format itself. It was intended mostly as an intermediate format for process.