On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 06:19:27PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote: > > HOWEVER, this might be a good time to think about whether we'd > > prefer a compressed format that we can random-access de/compress > > on the fly instead of going via a huge (and with image data we > > can easily be talking HUGE) temporary intermediate file. > > If we would compress the image data in the archive there would be no > need for compression of the archive. Sure you could gain a few bytes > by compressing the XML but since the already compressed image data > doesn't compress well and in the worst case even gets larger, I don't > see why anyone would want to compress the archive. Agreed. I have a more concrete suggestion (I'm still favoring ZIP files because they can somehow be handled without a GIMP which is useful, e.g. if they are broken): Make an uncompressed ZIP (or maybe compress the XML part only). The XML describes the structure and all attributes. GIMP-Image.ZIP | +- image.xml | +- comment.{txt,html,xml} | +- layer1.png (stored uncompressed) | +- layer1.1.png | +- layer2.png ... | +- image-thumbnail.png (optional) | +- whole-image.png (flattened image, optional) IMO this is a sane approach. It has lots of benefits: - image contents are accessible without a GIMP - thumbnails can be extracted easily - a user can mess with the image - images could be generated with external tools (just create the XML, add some images as layers, here you are) - it could be scanned for Java-viruses :-> Bye, Tino. -- * LINUX - Where do you want to be tomorrow? * http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/linux/tag/