1.
Autodesk
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Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Rafael, California, and features a gallery of its customers work in its San Francisco building, the company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of AutoCAD, the companys flagship computer-aided design software. Its AutoCAD and Revit software is used by architects, engineers, and structural designers to design, draft. Autodesk software has been used in fields, from the New York Freedom Tower to Tesla electric cars. The companys Revit line of software for Building Information Modeling is designed to let users explore the planning, construction, Autodesks Media and Entertainment division creates software for visual effects, color grading, and editing as well as animation, game development, and design visualization. 3ds Max and Maya are both 3D animation software used in visual effects and game development. Autodesk Suites, Subscription and Web Services, which includes Autodesk Cloud, Autodesk Labs, in what was seen as an unusual step for a maker of high-end business software, Autodesk began offering AutoCAD LT2012 for Mac through the Apple Mac App Store. The products from the group include 123D, Fluid FX, Homestyler, Pixlr, users range from children, students and artists to makers and DIYers. The Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry group is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, in a LEED Platinum building designed, Autodesks architecture, engineering, and construction solutions include AutoCAD-based design and documentation software such as AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, and AutoCAD Civil 3D. Their flagship product for relational Building information modeling is Revit, Revit is available as Revit Architecture, Revit Structure, Revit MEP or an all-in-one product. Projects that have used software from the Autodesk AEC division include the NASA Ames building, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Shanghai Tower, Autodesks manufacturing industry group is headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment Division is based in Montreal, Quebec and it was established in 1999 after Autodesk, Inc. acquired Discreet Logic, Inc. and merged its operations with Kinetix. In January 2006, Autodesk acquired Alias, a developer of 3D graphics technology, in October 2008, Autodesk acquired the Softimage brand from Avid. The principal product offerings from the Media and Entertainment Division are the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites, which include Maya, Softimage, 3ds Max, Mudbox, Smoke, Flame, much of Avatars visual effects were created with Autodesk media and entertainment software. Autodesk software enabled Avatar director James Cameron to aim a camera at actors wearing motion-capture suits in a studio, in 2011, Autodesk acquired a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities called Pixlr. Autodesk develops and purchased many specific-purpose renderers but many Autodesk products are bundled with third-party renderers such as NVIDIA MentalRay or Iray, Autodesk Raytracer - a simple pathtracing renderer which is based on Opticore technology. Maya Vector - a vector based on Electric Rains RAViX technology. The problem with this part of Autodesks history is that it was a time of discovery in computer graphics, in this sense Lightscape was more than just another product, it was an essential part of the development of rendering technology generally, and part of its evolution
2.
Software release life cycle
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Usage of the alpha/beta test terminology originated at IBM. As long ago as the 1950s, IBM used similar terminology for their hardware development, a test was the verification of a new product before public announcement. B test was the verification before releasing the product to be manufactured, C test was the final test before general availability of the product. Martin Belsky, a manager on some of IBMs earlier software projects claimed to have invented the terminology, IBM dropped the alpha/beta terminology during the 1960s, but by then it had received fairly wide notice. The usage of beta test to refer to testing done by customers was not done in IBM, rather, IBM used the term field test. Pre-alpha refers to all activities performed during the project before formal testing. These activities can include requirements analysis, software design, software development, in typical open source development, there are several types of pre-alpha versions. Milestone versions include specific sets of functions and are released as soon as the functionality is complete, the alpha phase of the release life cycle is the first phase to begin software testing. In this phase, developers generally test the software using white-box techniques, additional validation is then performed using black-box or gray-box techniques, by another testing team. Moving to black-box testing inside the organization is known as alpha release, alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss. Alpha software may not contain all of the features that are planned for the final version, in general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon in proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions. The alpha phase usually ends with a freeze, indicating that no more features will be added to the software. At this time, the software is said to be feature complete, Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. Software in the stage is also known as betaware. Beta phase generally begins when the software is complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing, the process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it. Beta version software is useful for demonstrations and previews within an organization
3.
Computer-aided design
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Computer-aided design is the use of computer systems to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. CAD software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, CAD output is often in the form of electronic files for print, machining, or other manufacturing operations. The term CADD is also used and its use in designing electronic systems is known as electronic design automation, or EDA. In mechanical design it is known as mechanical design automation or computer-aided drafting, however, it involves more than just shapes. CAD may be used to design curves and figures in space, or curves, surfaces. CAD is also used to produce computer animation for special effects in movies, advertising and technical manuals. The modern ubiquity and power of computers means that even perfume bottles, because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics, and discrete differential geometry. The design of models for object shapes, in particular, is occasionally called computer-aided geometric design. Eventually CAD provided the designer with the ability to perform engineering calculations, during this transition, calculations were still performed either by hand or by those individuals who could run computer programs. CAD was a change in the engineering industry, where draftsmen, designers. It did not eliminate departments, as much as it merged departments and empowered draftsman, CAD is just another example of the pervasive effect computers were beginning to have on industry. Current computer-aided design software packages range from 2D vector-based drafting systems to 3D solid, modern CAD packages can also frequently allow rotations in three dimensions, allowing viewing of a designed object from any desired angle, even from the inside looking out. Some CAD software is capable of mathematical modeling, in which case it may be marketed as CAD. CAD technology is used in the design of tools and machinery and in the drafting and design of all types of buildings and it can also be used to design objects. Furthermore, many CAD applications now offer advanced rendering and animation capabilities so engineers can better visualize their product designs, 4D BIM is a type of virtual construction engineering simulation incorporating time or schedule related information for project management. CAD has become an important technology within the scope of computer-aided technologies, with benefits such as lower product development costs. CAD enables designers to layout and develop work on screen, print it out, computer-aided design is one of the many tools used by engineers and designers and is used in many ways depending on the profession of the user and the type of software in question. Document management and revision control using Product Data Management, potential blockage of view corridors and shadow studies are also frequently analyzed through the use of CAD
4.
ASCII
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ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6,1960, the first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting of lists, and added features for other than teleprinters. Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, for example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters,33 are non-printing control characters that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, of these, the IANA encourages use of the name US-ASCII for Internet uses of ASCII. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute and ultimately the American National Standards Institute, there was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting, the X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters, renaming some control characters and moving or removing others. ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3. 4-1967, then USAS X3. 4-1968, ANSI X3. 4-1977 and they proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems, like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols. This allows digital devices to communicate each other and to process, store. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters,10 numerical digits, ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of a function, which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is reliable for data transmission. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code, the committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal
5.
Binary file
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A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term binary file is used as a term meaning non-text file. Binary files are usually thought of as being a sequence of bytes, binary files typically contain bytes that are intended to be interpreted as something other than text characters. Compiled computer programs are examples, indeed, compiled applications are sometimes referred to, particularly by programmers. But binary files can also mean that they contain images, sounds, compressed versions of files, etc. — in short. Some binary files contain headers, blocks of metadata used by a program to interpret the data in the file. The header often contains a signature or magic number which can identify the format, for example, a GIF file can contain multiple images, and headers are used to identify and describe each block of image data. The leading bytes of the header would contain text like GIF87a or GIF89a that can identify the binary as a GIF file, if a binary file does not contain any headers, it may be called a flat binary file. To send binary files through certain systems that do not allow all data values, encoding the data has the disadvantage of increasing the file size during the transfer, as well as requiring translation back into binary after receipt. See Binary-to-text encoding for more on this subject, a hex editor or viewer may be used to view file data as a sequence of hexadecimal values for corresponding bytes of a binary file. If a binary file is opened in an editor, each group of eight bits will typically be translated as a single character. Other type of viewers simply replace the characters with spaces revealing only the human-readable text. This type of view is useful for inspection of a binary file in order to find passwords in games, find hidden text in non-text files. It can even be used to inspect suspicious files for unwanted effects, for example, the user would see any URL/email to which the suspected software may attempt to connect in order to upload unapproved data. If the file is itself treated as an executable and run, standards are very important to binary files. For example, a binary file interpreted by the ASCII character set will result in text being displayed, a custom application can interpret the file differently, a byte may be a sound, or a pixel, or even an entire word. Binary itself is meaningless, until such time as an executed algorithm defines what should be done with each bit, byte, thus, just examining the binary and attempting to match it against known formats can lead to the wrong conclusion as to what it actually represents. This fact can be used in steganography, where an algorithm interprets a binary data file differently to reveal hidden content, without the algorithm, it is impossible to tell that hidden content exists
6.
Text editor
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A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files. Such programs are known as notepad software, following the Microsoft Notepad. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, there are important differences between plain text files created by a text editor and document files created by word processors such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. A plain text file uses a character encoding such as UTF-8 or ASCII to represent numbers, letters, the only non-printing characters in the file that can be used to format the text are newline, tab, and formfeed. Plain text files are displayed using a monospace font so horizontal alignment. Although they are viewed with formatting, documents using markup languages are stored in plain text files that contain a combination of human-readable text. For example, web pages are plain text with HTML tags to achieve formatting when rendered by a web browser, many web pages also contain embedded JavaScript that is interpreted by the browser. When both formats are available, the user must select with care, saving a plain text file in a word-processor format adds formatting information that can make the text unreadable by a program that expects plain text. Conversely, saving a document as plain text removes any formatting information. Before text editors existed, computer text was punched into cards with keypunch machines, physical boxes of these thin cardboard cards were then inserted into a card-reader. Magnetic tape and disk card-image files created from such card decks often had no characters at all. An alternative to cards was punched paper tape and it could be created by some teleprinters, which used special characters to indicate ends of records. The first text editors were line editors oriented to teleprinter- or typewriter-style terminals without displays, commands effected edits to a file at an imaginary insertion point called the cursor. Edits were verified by typing a command to print a small section of the file, in some line editors, the cursor could be moved by commands that specified the line number in the file, text strings for which to search, and eventually regular expressions. Line editors were major improvements over keypunching, some line editors could be used by keypunch, editing commands could be taken from a deck of cards and applied to a specified file. Some common line editors supported a mode in which change commands displayed the altered lines. When computer terminals with video screens became available, screen-based text editors became common, one of the earliest full-screen editors was O26, which was written for the operator console of the CDC6000 series computers in 1967. Another early full-screen editor was vi, written in the 1970s, it is still a standard editor on Unix and Linux operating systems
7.
LibreCAD
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LibreCAD is a free Computer-aided design application for 2D design. It works on Linux, OS X, Unix and Windows operating systems, LibreCAD was developed as a fork of QCad Community Edition. The GUI of LibreCAD is based on Qt4 libraries, so it runs on platforms in the same way. Most of the interface and handle concepts are analogous to AutoCAD, LibreCAD uses the AutoCAD DXF file format internally for import and save files, as well as allowing export to many other file formats. As the GNU LibreDWG library is released under GPLv3 it cant be used by GPLv2 licensed LibreCAD as their licenses are incompatible, a request also went to the FSF to relicense GNU LibreDWG as GPLv2, which was rejected. This controversy has been resolved by writing a new GPLv2 licensed library called libdxfrw, official website LibreCAD on GitHub LibreCAD on SourceForge. net
8.
Raster graphics
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Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats. A raster is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels, the printing and prepress industries know raster graphics as contones. The opposite to contones is line work, usually implemented as vector graphics in digital systems, the word raster has its origins in the Latin rastrum, which is derived from radere. It originates from the scan of cathode ray tube video monitors. By association, it can refer to a rectangular grid of pixels. The word rastrum is now used to refer to a device for drawing musical staff lines, most modern computers have bitmapped displays, where each on-screen pixel directly corresponds to a small number of bits in memory. The screen is refreshed simply by scanning through pixels and coloring them according to set of bits. The refresh procedure, being speed critical, is implemented by dedicated circuitry. Most computer images are stored in raster graphics formats or compressed variations, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG, three-dimensional voxel raster graphics are employed in video games and are also used in medical imaging such as MRI scanners. GIS programs commonly use rasters that encode geographic data in the values as well as the pixel locations. Raster graphics are resolution dependent, meaning they cannot scale up to a resolution without loss of apparent quality. This property contrasts with the capabilities of graphics, which easily scale up to the quality of the device rendering them. Raster graphics deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images, typically, a resolution of 150 to 300 PPI works well for 4-color process printing. However, for printing technologies that perform color mixing through dithering rather than through overprinting, printer DPI and image PPI have a different meaning. Thus, for instance, printing an image at 250 PPI may actually require a printer setting of 1200 DPI, when an image is rendered in a raster-based image editor, the image is composed of millions of pixels. At its core, an image editor works by manipulating each individual pixel. Most pixel-based image editors work using the RGB color model, and this article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the relicensing terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later
9.
APNG
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The Animated Portable Network Graphics file format is an extension to the Portable Network Graphics specification. It allows for animated PNG files that work similarly to animated GIF files, while supporting 24-bit images and it also retains backward compatibility with non-animated PNG files. The first frame of an APNG file is stored as a normal PNG stream, the frame speed data and extra animation frames are stored in extra chunks. APNG competes with Multiple-image Network Graphics, a format for bitmapped animations created by the same team as PNG. APNGs advantage is the library size and compatibility with older PNG implementations. The APNG specification was created in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukićević of the Mozilla Corporation to allow for storing the animations needed for such as throbbers. Among users and maintainers of the PNG and MNG formats, APNG had a lukewarm reception, in particular, PNG was conceived to be a single-image format. The PNG group officially rejected APNG as an extension on April 20,2007. There have been several subsequent proposals for a simple animated graphics format based on PNG using several different approaches, Mozilla Firefox added support for APNG in version 3 trunk builds on March 23,2007. Iceweasel 3 supports APNG by using Mozillas unofficial variant of libpng, in 2008 WorldDMB adopted APNG as a backward compatible extension to enable animation as part of the MOT SlideShow user application for Digital Radio. APNG1.0 Specification - Animated Portable Network Graphics is included as normative Annex A in the ETSI standard TS101499 V2.2.1, in 2010 Commercial Radio Broadcasters in Sydney began to include APNG animations in DAB+ digital radio broadcasts. These APNG animations are carried by the MOT slideshow application which accompanies the audio services and it is expected that other cities in Australia will follow in early 2011. Mozillas role in extending the PNG format to APNG echoes Netscapes much earlier role in popularizing animated GIFs, in 2016, Apple adopted the APNG format as the preferred format for animated stickers in iOS10 iMessage apps. On March 15,2017 APNG support was added to Chromium and this leaves Microsoft Edges Rendering Engine as the only engine to not support the format. A server-side library exists that allows web browsers that support the canvas tag, examples of such browsers include Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 9. For image processing software that doesnt export to APNG, users can use a program called APNG Assembler and it creates highly optimized Animated PNG files from PNG/TGA image sequences. A PNG file consists of the PNG Signature, followed by a series of chunks, a chunk consists of four parts, Length, Chunk type, Chunk data and CRC. There are about 20 different chunk types, but for a minimal PNG, only 3 are required, The IHDR chunk, one or more IDAT chunks, the next graphic shows the contents of such a minimal PNG file, representing just one red pixel
10.
BMP file format
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The BMP file format is capable of storing two-dimensional digital images both monochrome and color, in various color depths, and optionally with data compression, alpha channels, and color profiles. The Windows Metafile specification covers the BMP file format, among others wingdi. h defines BMP constants and structures. They called these device-independent bitmaps or DIBs, and the format for them is called DIB file format or BMP image file format. According to Microsoft support, A device-independent bitmap is a used to define device-independent bitmaps in various color resolutions. The main purpose of DIBs is to allow bitmaps to be moved from one device to another, a DIB is an external format, in contrast to a device-dependent bitmap, which appears in the system as a bitmap object. A DIB is normally transported in metafiles, BMP files, the following sections discuss the data stored in the BMP file or DIB in detail. This is the standard BMP file format, some applications create bitmap image files which are not compliant with the Microsoft documentation. Also, not all fields are used, a value of 0 will be found in these unused fields, the bitmap image file consists of fixed-size structures as well as variable-size structures appearing in a predetermined sequence. Many different versions of some of these structures can appear in the file, the in-memory DIB data structure is almost the same as the BMP file format, but it does not contain the 14-byte bitmap file header and begins with the DIB header. For DIBs loaded in memory, the table can also consist of 16-bit entries that constitute indexes to the currently realized palette. In all cases, the array must begin at a memory address that is a multiple of 4 bytes. In non-packed DIBs loaded in memory, the optional color profile data should be located immediately after the table and before the gap1. In all cases, the array must begin at a memory address that is a multiple of 4 bytes. In some cases it may be necessary to adjust the number of entries in the table in order to force the memory address of the pixel array to a multiple of 4 bytes. For packed DIBs loaded in memory, the optional color profile data should immediately follow the pixel array, packed DIBs are required by Windows clipboard API functions as well as by some Windows patterned brush and resource functions. This block of bytes is at the start of the file and is used to identify the file, a typical application reads this block first to ensure that the file is actually a BMP file and that it is not damaged. The first 2 bytes of the BMP file format are the character B then the character M in ASCII encoding, all of the integer values are stored in little-endian format. This block of bytes tells the detailed information about the image
11.
BSAVE (bitmap format)
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A BSAVE Image as it is referenced in a graphics program is an image file format created usually by saving raw video memory to disk. The BASIC BSAVE command is a general command meant for dumping ranges of addresses to disk. Data could be recalled using the counterpart BLOAD command, some platforms provided a BRUN command that would immediately attempt to execute the loaded RAM image as a program. BSAVE was in use as a file format when the IBM PC was introduced. It was also in use on the Apple II in the same time period. Although the commands were available on the Commodore PET line, they were removed from the later Commodore 64, in 1985 the Commodore 128 was released with Commodore BASIC version 7.0 which restored the BSAVE and BLOAD commands. The BSAVED format is a device-dependent raster image format, the file header stores information about the hardware address. The graphics data follows the header directly and is stored as raw data in the format of the native adapters addressable memory, there is no file compression, and therefore these load very quickly and without much programming when displayed in native mode. No additional information, such as screen resolution, color depth and palette information, bit planes, Video adapters were simple when this format was in wide use and the other information necessary to display the image could usually be inferred by programs that loaded such files. The BASIC programming language was shipped as part of the system on the first IBM PCs, Apple. On computers that did not start up in BASIC, BASIC was loaded by manually running the BASIC interpreter, the user could then type BASIC commands in direct mode or by creating and/or running a numbered BASIC program within the interpreter. One of the commands that early BASIC offered was BSAVE and another command was BLOAD, using the BSAVE command, an addressable area and length of memory could be saved to disk as a named file. This Image of saved memory could then be reloaded from disk into addressable memory later with the BLOAD command, if the BSAVEd image contained program code it could be executed, if data it could be used again, and if the BSAVEd image contained graphics it could be viewed. The video area of memory was addressable, the PUT and GET commands were used in addition to the BSAVE and BLOAD commands on the IBM PC to allow clips of the screen to be pre-formatted for BSAVE and BLOAD. PUT and GET allowed display modifier verbs which resembled functions in the Windows Graphical Device Interface used by programmers later. Microsoft produced the BASIC interpreters that were bundled with the IBM PC, Apple II, and Commodore PET, and included the ability to BSAVE and BLOAD RAM images on all 3 platforms. It was possible for users of the day to use the BLOAD command to load a graphics image that had been BSAVED in addition to loading a BSAVED executable or data image. With the passing of MS-DOS so did the use of DOS programs that saved in the BSAVED format and their use by programmers has stopped because the BLOAD command is no longer supported in modern programming languages which discourage accessing video memory directly
12.
FITS
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Flexible Image Transport System is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy, the FITS format was first standardized in 1981, it has evolved gradually since then, and the most recent version was standardized in 2008. FITS was designed with an eye towards long-term archival storage, a major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human-readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. The information in the header is designed to calculate the byte offset of some information in the subsequent data unit to direct access to the data cells. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images that carry keyword/value pairs, FITS is also often used to store non-image data, such as spectra, photon lists, data cubes, or even structured data such as multi-table databases. A FITS file may contain several extensions, and each of these may contain a data object, for example, it is possible to store x-ray and infrared exposures in the same file. The earliest and still most commonly used type of FITS data is an image header/data block, the term image is somewhat loosely applied, as the format supports data arrays of arbitrary dimension—normal image data are usually 2-D or 3-D. The data themselves may be in one of several integer and floating-point formats, FITS image headers can contain information about one or more scientific coordinate systems that are overlaid on the image itself. The WCS standard includes many different spherical projections, including, for example, FITS also supports tabular data with named columns and multidimensional rows. Both binary and ASCII table formats have been specified, the data in each column of the table can be in a different format from the others. Together with the ability to string multiple header/data blocks together, this allows FITS files to represent entire relational databases, the FITS Support Office at NASA/GSFC maintains a list of libraries and platforms that currently support FITS. Image processing programs such as ImageJ, GIMP, Photoshop, XnView and IrfanView can generally read simple FITS images, scientific teams frequently write their own code to interact with their FITS data, using the tools available in their language of choice. The FITS Liberator software is used by imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the SAOImage DS9 Astronomical Data Visualization Application is available for many OSs, and handles images and headers. Many scientific computing environments make use of the system data in the FITS header to display, compare, rectify. The FITS standard version 3.0 was officially approved by the IAU FITS Working Group in July 2008, FITS I/O Libraries, a list of software for reading and writing FITS files for various languages
13.
GIF
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The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame, GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985, controversy over the licensing agreement between the software patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics standard. By 2004 all the relevant patents had expired, CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. The original version of the GIF format was called 87a, in 1989, CompuServe released an enhanced version, called 89a, which added support for animation delays, transparent background colors, and storage of application-specific metadata. The 89a specification also supports incorporating text labels as text, but as there is control over display fonts. The two versions can be distinguished by looking at the first six bytes of the file, which, CompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64, GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM. In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added Animated GIF support, the feature of storing multiple images in one file, accompanied by control data, is used extensively on the Web to produce simple animations. As a noun, the word GIF is found in the editions of many dictionaries. In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Press recognized GIF as a verb as well, meaning to create a GIF file, as in GIFing was perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics. The presss lexicographers voted it their word of the year, saying that GIFs have evolved into a tool with serious applications including research, in May 2015 Facebook added GIF support, even though they originally didnt support them on their site. The creators of the format pronounced the word as jif with a soft G /ˈdʒɪf/ as in gin, the word is now also widely pronounced with a hard G /ˈɡɪf/ as in gift. The American Heritage Dictionary cites both, indicating jif as the pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English offers only the hard-G pronunciation. Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary and the OED cite both pronunciations, but place gif in the default position, the New Oxford American Dictionary gave only jif in its 2nd edition but updated it to jif, gif in its 3rd edition. The disagreement over the pronunciation led to heated Internet debate, the White House and TV program Jeopardy. Also waded into the debate during 2013, GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors. This takes advantage of the formats lossless compression, which favors flat areas of color with well defined edges
14.
SilverFast
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SilverFast is the name of a family of software for image scanning and processing, including photos, documents and slides, developed by LaserSoft Imaging. SilverFast was introduced in 1995, Version 3.0 was finished in December 1996 and it is the only software supporting the Heidelberg scanner on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7. Some scanner manufacturers bundle their hardware with SilverFast, in 2011 version 8 was introduced, and HDR imaging software followed in 2012. Optional, 1)Multi-Exposure, 2)ICC Printer Calibration, 3)PhotoProof, 4)ColorServer It can be used as an application, as a Photoshop plug-in. It contains features for reading the data from the camera, for processing, optimizing. SilverFast DC Pro has the functionality of the scanner-software SilverFast Ai for digital images, supported are the standard image formats such as JPEG and TIFF, and unprocessed raw image format. The access to the raw data permits manual color correction or sharpening instead of using the automatic adjustment. SilverFast DC supports Adobe DNG and many models, some optimized by special camera profiles. With the included IT8-target, individual ICC profiles can be self-made for every camera, SilverFast DC Pro also has automated color optimization AACO, support for JPEG2000, unsharpmasking USMPlus, CloneTool, and an improved PrinTao module with text and layout functions. SilverFast HDR is a program for processing 48-bit raw images. Many newer scanners are able to output the image directly with all existing data instead of breaking it down to 24-bit and this 48-bit raw image can be saved immediately and digital processing performed later. SilverFast HDR can be used as a native plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, as a universal TWAIN module, the HDR Studio has AACO, JPEG2000, USMPlus, CloneTool and PrinTao. With version 6.6.1 any SilverFast HDR version supports the proprietary RAW data format HDRi and these 64-bit HDRi color files and 32-bit HDRi greyscale files contain additional 16-bit infrared RAW data besides the 48-bit color RAW data and 16-bit greyscale RAW data respectively. Therefore, a scanner with a channel available to the software is necessary. This RAW format can keep any readable image information for later post-processing, the acronym HDR as used by SilverFast is not related to High-dynamic-range imaging, a widely used technique to increase the dynamic range of images. The data format is, The SilverFast Archive Suite includes SilverFast Ai IT8 and this package is suitable for archiving slides, negatives, and photos, whereas the post processing can take place anytime after scanning. Templates can be used to make workflow easier and faster by reducing similar, PrinTao has predefined templates to which the user can add self-made ones. The PrinTao module is already included in the SilverFast Ai / DC / HDR Studio versions and this is accomplished by scanning the original multiple times with different exposure times, increasing the dynamic range and preserving detail in the light and shadow areas of the image
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Apple Icon Image format
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The Apple Icon Image format is the icon format used in Apple Inc. s macOS. It supports icons of 16 ×16,32 ×32,48 ×48,128 ×128,256 ×256,512 ×512, the fixed-size icons can be scaled by the operating system and displayed at any intermediate size. The file format consists of an 8 byte header, followed by any number of icons, over time the format has been improved and there is support for compression of some parts of the pixel data. The 32-bit pixel data is compressed with a format similar to PackBits. Some sources mentioned that the OS supports both compressed or uncompressed data chunks, the values inside the brackets in the length column is the uncompressed length. Various image viewers can load *. icns files, a free, gTK+ can load *. icns resources since 2007. Other tools supporting the format include the Apple Icon Composer and icns Browser, The Iconfactory, ICO format on Windows X PixMap format for X11
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ILBM
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The LBM file extension is an image file in Interchange File Format structure to store image or palette data. Most commonly you can find these files in InterLeaved BitMap format, but some games are using a similar, both formats commonly exist under the. lbm file extension, occasionally appearing also as. bbm extension. ILBM and PBM formats are used by games from late 80s, in essence LBM files consist of a number of consecutive chunks, whose order can, to some extent, be varied. Each chunk has a different function and has the basic format. This means that a program does not have to read or decode every chunk in a file, for example, a program might use a TIME chunk to store the date and time that a file was last edited. For details on the structure and how to read them. LBM files usually contain enough information to them to be displayed by an image editing program, including image dimensions, palette. Some files were designed to act as palettes for paint programs or to be merged into another image and this makes them much more flexible, but also much more complex than other formats such as BMP. For LBMs the BMHD chunk and any other vital chunks must appear before the BODY chunk, any chunks appearing after BODY are considered extra and many programs will leave them unread and unchanged. There are many possible chunk types, however, there are only a limited number of common chunk types used and understood by most programs, and descriptions of these follow. Again refer to Interchange File Format for further detail about finding and handling chunks, the BMHD chunk specifies how the image is to be displayed and is usually the first chunk inside the FORM. It not only defines the images height/width, but where it is drawn on the screen, how to display it in various screen resolutions, the content of this chunk is as follows, The BODY chunk is usually the last chunk in a file, and the largest. In ILBM files the BODY chunk stores the image data as interleaved bitplanes by row. The bitplanes appear first from 1 to n, followed by the mask plane, in PBM files the BODY chunk is simpler as uncompressed it is just a continuous stream of bytes containing image data. If an image is compressed, each row of data is compressed individually, the compression is a variety of RLE Compression using flags. It can be decoded as follows, Loop until we have bytes worth of data While <, Read a byte If >128, then, Read the next byte, Move forward 2 bytes and return to step 1. Else if <128, then, Read and output the next bytes Move forward bytes, always encode >3 byte repeats as replicate runs. A CAMG chunk is specifically for the Commodore Amiga computer and it stores a LONG viewport mode
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JBIG2
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JBIG2 is an image compression standard for bi-level images, developed by the Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group. It is suitable for both lossless and lossy compression, JBIG2 has been published in 2000 as the international standard ITU T.88, and in 2001 as ISO/IEC14492. Ideally, a JBIG2 encoder will segment the input page into regions of text, regions of halftone images, regions that are neither text nor halftones are typically compressed using a context-dependent arithmetic coding algorithm called the MQ coder. Textual regions are compressed as follows, the pixels in the regions are grouped into symbols. A dictionary of symbols is then created and encoded, typically also using context-dependent arithmetic coding, typically, a symbol will correspond to a character of text, but this is not required by the compression method. Halftone images may be compressed by reconstructing the image used to generate the halftone. Overall, the used by JBIG2 to compress text is very similar to the JB2 compression scheme used in the DjVu file format for coding binary images. PDF files versions 1.4 and above may contain JBIG2-compressed data, open-source decoders for JBIG2 are jbig2dec, the java-based jbig2-imageio and the decoder found in versions 2.00 and above of xpdf. Typically, an image consists mainly of a large amount of textual and halftone data. The bi-level image is segmented into three regions, text, halftone, and generic regions, each region is coded differently and the coding methodologies are described in the following passage. Text coding is based on the nature of human visual interpretation, a human observer cannot tell the difference between two instances of the same characters in a bi-level image even though they may not exactly match pixel by pixel. Therefore, only the bitmap of one representative character instance needs to be coded instead of coding the bitmaps of each occurrence of the same character individually, for each character instance, the coded instance of the character is then stored into a symbol dictionary. There are two encoding methods for image data, pattern matching and substitution and soft pattern matching. These methods are presented in the following subsections, the position is usually relative to another previously coded character. If a match is not found, the segmented pixel block is coded directly, typical procedures of pattern matching and substitution algorithm are displayed in the left block diagram of the figure above. Although the method of PM&S can achieve outstanding compression, substitution errors could be made during the process if the resolution is low. The deployment of refinement data can make the character-substitution error mentioned earlier highly unlikely, the refinement data contains the current desired character instance, which is coded using the pixels of both the current character and the matching character in the dictionary. Since it is known that the current character instance is highly correlated with the matched character, halftone images can be compressed using two methods
