From: Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Phil Harper" <philharper@xxxxxxxxxxx>,gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [Gimp-developer] GimpCon RFC: Portable XCF Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 20:54:55 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0
At 11:42 PM +0000 8/13/03, Phil Harper wrote:well, it'd be interesting to see if Adobe added XCF to Photo$hop, after all, GIMP is the competition, it wouldn't be in their interests to support a multilayered image format that it controlled by someone else(although they might support PSP, i don't know haven't checked.)
They support a number of formats that they don't control - because they are standard formats that their customers are requesting. But today XCF isn't one of them, and probably won't be for a while.
the last thing Adobe wants to do is support XCF, it's a competing format belonging to a competing(and competatively priced) app.
it would be good if Jasc and Corel were to pick it up as a standard interchange format, that would put Adobe under some pressure at least.
It might, but again, I can't see them doing it. What's the ROI for them to invest in this? They already support PSD and TIFF as the two richest formats for layered raster images. (not to mention PS and PDF).
there's very little, but eveything else seems rather speculative at this stage, so why not.
but that means you'd have to leave out any new improvements to GIMP layer handling that are made, otherwise you'd be breaking compatibility with the "standard"(yes, that is a joke),
That is true, and a big reason to not use PSD...
as for TIFF, you wouldn't be able to do it in a standard readable TIFF,
This, however, is wrong! We can represent EVERYTHING in GIMP today, and EVERYTHING for GEGL (etc.) in the future with TIFF. And other programs simply will ignore them as they do with other features of TIFF they don't support.
why would i want to save to a file format that would render my image that's built up of layer masks and vector text layers really badly if opened in a standard viewer rather than in a format engineered from the ground up for all of the requirements i could have, and that is distinctive as being a GIMP image format, rather than just a really ugly TIFF?
can you post a multilayer TIFF somewhere for me to try out, i've never encountered one before, and it would be interesting to see how it's handled.
Easy enough to create one with ImageMagick using a bunch of other files.
convert a.png b.jpg c.gif +adjoin output.tiff
thanks i might try that.
it'd be nice if your app could read and render a flat version of the image if you don't support layers i supose, this is an interesting one since all these different target apps will handle things like layermodes differently, and some wouldn't even be supported.
EXACTLY my point!
Whatever file format we end up with, we need to accept that not all consumers of that file format will be able to support 100% of the features (perhaps not even GIMP itself).
so why use a format that all consumers would expect to be able to utilise 100%, it would surely confuse the hell out of your average photo$hop users to use TIFF in this way, especially if we're looking at cross compatibility.
Adobe does that with .ai, which is really .pdf...
i thought it was a kind of encapsulated post script
It was through version 8, but since version 9, it has been PDF...
ah, i see
no, that simply wouldn't be flexible enough, surely, i mean you could have extra data about how do use the layers in the TIFF but if those aren't recognised by other readers you just get a strange result and a confused decoder.
You could get that just as easily with XCF when a given consumer/reader doesn't support 100% of the features of the format...
in which case you'd have to do something about a workaround, like maybe have an optional pre-rendered version of the image stored in the XCF for viewers that don't support it properly, but, at that point it's questionable that you'd want to view an XCFin something other than GIMP, remember, GIMP has this handy thing called export, if your target audience wont be able to read an XCF then don't give them one, give then a PNG instead.
Phil.
Leonard
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Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.lazerware.com>
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