PNG is a really underappreciated format. It's amazing how an 8-bit PNG can make a lot of icons super small without losing quality. Without PNG being held up as open software we would most likely not have the graphics we take for granted now.
I don't know him as a human being, but I would hope he is a great one, too.
Sure, if with "some extra tricks" you mean "four relatively simple scanline filters[0] that nevertheless Paretro Principle[1] the heck out of more complex forms of lossless compression".
Especially Paeth is amazing in how it makes gradients so much cheaper than naive approaches with such a simple formula.
Similarly relying on DEFLATE is smart too, as that means any improvement to that format can be safely applied to PNG as well, like with zopflipng[1].
Sure it’s smart and well thought-out. It’s not worth the Nobel prize though.
The achievement in PNG is in beating the de facto standard when it was created, GIF. That’s pretty difficult because GIF is almost good enough, except for features that are hard to explain to non technical people. They don’t care that GIF was covered by software patents and they don’t know about 1 bit transparency and color palettes. They know that GIF is supported in all software they care about, and that GIF has animation to boot.
I prefer PNGs to almost any other format in my documents, since they seem to be almost lossless and also dont bloat the size. Such a great work must surely be a product of a brilliant Mind. RIP Glenn Randers-Pehrson.
There are, but those are not the ones one thinks of by default when talking about PNG. If they do, they should clearly tell you they are doing something nonstandard.
I've noticed a lot of us despair about whether we can contribute as an engineer as we get older. I didnt know Glenn but to be a badass coder and maintainer of hugely popular library at his age is truly inspirational.
Started out as a geophysicist for a Texas oil company, then served in the military, then a number of physicist gigs with the government, including with the army and at Livermore Laboratory. His most recent gig is "(Volunteer) Software Developer and Maintainer" -- Jan 1995 - Present"
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadI was working with Glenn on GitHub and I didn't know.
https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/pull/177 was my last interaction with him. He seemed to really care about libpng and making it better.
Thanks Glenn; I still export to PNG all the time.
I don't know him as a human being, but I would hope he is a great one, too.
Thank you Glenn.
Sure, if with "some extra tricks" you mean "four relatively simple scanline filters[0] that nevertheless Paretro Principle[1] the heck out of more complex forms of lossless compression".
Especially Paeth is amazing in how it makes gradients so much cheaper than naive approaches with such a simple formula.
Similarly relying on DEFLATE is smart too, as that means any improvement to that format can be safely applied to PNG as well, like with zopflipng[1].
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Filters.html
[1] https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipn...
The achievement in PNG is in beating the de facto standard when it was created, GIF. That’s pretty difficult because GIF is almost good enough, except for features that are hard to explain to non technical people. They don’t care that GIF was covered by software patents and they don’t know about 1 bit transparency and color palettes. They know that GIF is supported in all software they care about, and that GIF has animation to boot.
The should be just plain (completely) lossless unless your image encoder is doing something evil behind your back.
RIP and a job well done.
RIP.
http://homepages.rpi.edu/~randeg/paleo_pngs.html
Started out as a geophysicist for a Texas oil company, then served in the military, then a number of physicist gigs with the government, including with the army and at Livermore Laboratory. His most recent gig is "(Volunteer) Software Developer and Maintainer" -- Jan 1995 - Present"