Timeline for Is the PNG file format acceptable for academic papers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 31, 2015 at 17:59 | comment | added | A. Donda | TIFF is a time-honored (not to say: old ;) format, imho it had the place of PNG before that existed, and I would still use it for some specialist application which is not covered by PNG, e.g. layers. However, it is also a very complex file format with several extensions (one of which covers compression, base TIFF is uncompressed), and for this reason to my knowledge no single piece of software supports the full specification. Therefore incompatibilities like those described by user2379888 can happen. I'd say, if you can do it with the simpler PNG format, use that one, otherwise use TIFF. | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 17:54 | comment | added | A. Donda | @StrongBad, BMP is most of the time used uncompressed, and only supports the quite weak RLE (run-length encoding) compression anyway, so BMP files will be much larger than the corresponding PNGs. Moreover, while documented and also implemented in open source software, BMP is a proprietary format of Microsoft, developed originally for use with Windows. There is no public standard for this format. | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 13:35 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| Mar 31, 2015 at 14:18 | |||||
| Mar 31, 2015 at 9:33 | comment | added | StrongBad | @A.Donda, probably off topic, but why PNG over TIFF or BMP? | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 22:46 | comment | added | user2379888 | The PNG format is superior to JPEG in a lot of ways. Though I try to format my images in PDF/EPS for journals. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 19:02 | comment | added | A. Donda | PNG is a ISO/IEC standard designed not to use patented methods, and therefore is clearly not proprietary. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 18:59 | comment | added | A. Donda | Unfortunately I can't agree. JPEG at "100%" (which is not clearly defined anyway but depends on the implementation) is still not lossless, and especially which sharp edges common in scientific illustrations artifacts are easily visible even at highest quality settings. Second, it doesn't make sense to blame the PNG standard for the side effects of a proprietary and incompatible software. So I would hope we can all agree ;-) that standard PNG is the best file format for the lossless transmission of bitmap images, with JPEG being a close second only for lossy transmission of photos. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 18:42 | comment | added | user1850420 | Thank you for your input. I believe we have all learned technical on the PNG and a rare reason not to use it in publications in the small chance that multilayer may cause problems, which in my experience it had. Working in a University, the Academics send JPEG files for publications. I think we can agree that JPEG 100% quality and reasonable resolution is probably more than ample for publications. For large poster printing then PNG 24 bit. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 16:09 | comment | added | Pieter Naaijkens | @user1850420 The PNG standard allows to store "private chunks" of data in the file, where applications can store for example metadata, or in the case of Fireworks, also separate layers. These private chunks are not standardised, that's why other applications might not support them. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 15:32 | comment | added | user1850420 | At the time I used Fireworks which used to be capable of multi-layer PNG, I don't know if it still can. According to forums, people say it is PNG is a hybrid proprietary format. GIMP does not support multi-layered PNG. There are some real oddball standard of standards formats out there. Extra advice. If anyone wants to extract layers from multilayered TIFF, I recommend irfanview which is an awesome free Image viewer/converter/filter depending on the plugins you use. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 15:04 | comment | added | Random832 | PNG does not support layers, however, it may store color values for fully transparent pixels. | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 14:42 | review | First posts | |||
| Mar 30, 2015 at 14:59 | |||||
| Mar 30, 2015 at 14:40 | history | answered | user1850420 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |