In article <1584.2176-29302-820979663-1170721827@seznam.cz>, =?us-ascii?Q?charlie=20chernohorsky?= <endlessoblivion@seznam.cz> writes:
I think PNG would actually do better at compressing them than gzip. But yeah, it doesn't really matter *how* you store them since an extension chunk is just a blob of binary data.
well, isn't a regular grayscale up to a 16 bit depth? i thought you were talk ing about something like "phantom image" with usual api constraints.. while now it seems you meant some custom data being appended.. of course it's better when it's packed together with the visual representation.. anyway, a raw outp ut (a sort of a dump) would be also of a use for postprocessing..
There are two things here. The image and the iteration counts. Both PNG and GIF image formats have extension chunks (there's one registered for fractint, but its not been specced out according to Tim). I'm saying the iteration counts would compress well as a PNG image because PNG recognizes the spatial locality of pixels while zip does not. So you can encode the iteration counts as a PNG image and stick that in an extension block designed to hold iteration counts.
with infinite iterations (more comes bellow) it's easy to get over 2^32..
OK, I see what you mean now about infinite iterations and I'd already considered that as something that's desirable before. And yeah, with deep zooms (especially arbitrary precision zooms) you could easily get over 2^32. The question is -- is it worth having a multiple precision 'int' to store the iteration counts then? I think yes for parfiles, but its less clear if we're talking about saving them with the image.
Hrm. I just killed printer support, so HPGL doesn't really make sense. SVG would be a good 'save' option so you can convert to other vector formats from there.
SVG: or edit it in Inkscape SVG editor just or view it with a web browser.. HPGL: i consider it also a save option, it's a sort of non-XML-SVG, some vector editors are also able to load it, and you can send it to the printer manually..
When things stabilize (i.e. plumbing changes are done), adding new save formats should be easy. It would be pretty easy to add them right now, but I'm reluctant to divert my plumbing activity into new features until the plumbing is done. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>