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When doing small icons, header graphics and the like for websites, is it better to use GIFs or PNGs?
Obviously if transparency effects are required, then PNGs are definitely the way to go, and for larger, more photographic images I'd use JPEGs - but for normal web "furniture", which would you recommend and why? It may just be the tools I'm using, but GIF files usually seem to be a bit smaller than a comparible PNG, but using them just seems so 1987.
As a general rule, PNG is never worse, and often better than GIF because of superior compression. There might be some edge cases where GIF is slightly better (because the PNG format may have a slightly larger overhead from metadata) but it's really not worth the worry.
It may just be the tools I'm using, but GIF files usually seem to be a bit smaller than a comparible PNG
That may indeed be due to the encoding tool you use.
/EDIT: Wow, there seem to be a lot of misconceptions about PNG file size. To quote Matt:
There's nothing wrong with GIFs for images with few colours, and as you have noticed they tend to be smaller.
This is a typical encoding mistake and not inherent in the format. You can control the colour depth and make the PNG file as small. Please refer to the relevant section in the Wikipedia article.
Also, lacking support in MSIE6 is blown out of proportion by Chrono:
If you need transparency and can get by with GIFs, then I'd recommend them because IE6 supports them. IE6 doesn't do well with transparent PNGs.
That's wrong. MSIE6 does support PNG transparency. It doesn't support the alpha channel (without a few hacks), though but this is a different matter since GIFs don't have it at all.
The only technical reason to use GIFs instead of PNGs is when use need animation and don't want to rely on other formats.
The W3C mention 3 advantages of PNG over GIF.
• Alpha channels (variable
transparency),
• Cross-platform gamma correction
(control of image brightness) and
color correction
• Two-dimensional interlacing (a
method of progressive display).
Also, have a look at these resources for guidance:
PNG v's GIF (W3C Guidance)
PNG FAQ
Wow, I'm really suprised with all the wrong answers here. PNG-8 will always be smaller than GIF when properly optimized. Just run your PNG-8 files through PngCrush or any of the other PNG optimization routines.
The key things to understand:
PNG8 and GIF are lossless <= 256 colors
PNG8 can always be smaller than GIF
GIF should never be used unless you need animation
and of course,
Use JPG for black&white or full color photographic images
Use PNG for low color, line art, screenshot type images
The main reason to use PNG over GIF from a legal standpoint is covered here:
http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.html
The patents have apparently expired as of 2004, but the idea that you can use PNG as open-source over GIF is appealing to many people.
(png open source reference: http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-09-09-021-04-PS)
Be careful of color shifts when using PNG. This link gives an example, and contains many more links with further explanation:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GammaCorrectionAndColorCorrectionPNGIsStillTooHard.aspx
GIF images are not subject to this problem.
I don't think it makes a lot of difference (customers don't care). Personally I would choose PNGs because they are a W3C standard.
Be cautious with the PNG transparency effects: they don't work with IE6.
For images on the web, each format has its pros and cons. For photograph-type images (ie lots and lots of colours, no hard edges) use a JPEG.
For icons and the like, you have a choice between PNG and GIF. GIFs are limited to 256 colours. PNGs can be formatted like GIFs (ie 256 colours, with 1-bit transparency that will work in IE6), but for small images they're slightly larger than GIFs. 24-bit PNGs support both a large gamut, and alpha transparency (although it's troublesome in IE6).
PNGS are your only really sensible choice for things like screenshots (ie, both lots of colours and hard edges), and personally, that's what I stick with most of the time, unless I have something for which JPEG is more suitable (like a photo).
Indexed PNG (less than 256 colors) is actually always smaller than gif, so I use that most of the time.
For computer generated graphics (i.e. drawn by yourself in Photoshop, Gimp, etc.) JPG is out of the question, because it is lossy - i.e. you get random gray pixels. For static images, PNG is better in every way: more colors, scalable transparency (say, 10% transparent, .gif only supports 0% and 100%), but there is a problem that some versions of Internet Explorer don't do PNG transparency correctly, so you get flat non-transparent background that looks ugly. If you don't care about those IE users, go for PNG.
BTW, if you want animations, go for GIF.
PNG is a 100% replacement for GIF files and is supported by all web browsers you are likely to encounter.
There are very, very few situations where GIF would be preferable. The most important one is animation--the GIF89a standard supports animation, and virtually every browser supports it, but the plain old PNG format does not--you would need to use MNG for that, which has limited browser support.
Virtually all browsers support single-bit transparency in PNG files (the type of transparency offered by the GIF format). There is a lack of support in IE6 for PNG's full 8-bit transparency, but that can be rectified for most situations by a little CSS magic.
If your PNG files are coming out larger than equivalent GIF files, it is almost certainly because your source image has more than 256 colors. GIF files are indexed to a maximum palette of 256 colors, while PNG files in most graphics programs are saved by default in a 24-bit lossless format. If file size is more important than accurate colors, save the file as an 8-bit indexed PNG and it should be equivalent to GIF or better.
It is possible to "hack" a GIF file to have more than 256 colors using a combination of animation frames with do-not-replace flags and multiple palettes, but this approach has been virtually forgotten about since the advent of PNG.
A major problem with GIFs are that it is a patent-encumbered format (EDIT: This is apparently no longer true). If you don't care about that, feel free to use GIFs. PNGs have a lot more flexibility over GIFs, particularly in the area of colorspace, but that flexibility often means you'll want to "optimize" the PNGs before publishing them. A web search should uncover tools for your platform for this.
Of course, if you want animation, GIF is the only way to go, since MNG was basically a non-starter for some reason.
"It may just be the tools I'm using, but GIF files usually seem to be a bit smaller than a comparible PNG, but using them just seems so 1987."
It probably is your tools. From the PNG FAQ:
"There are two main reasons behind this phenomenon: comparing apples and oranges (that is, not comparing the same image types), and using bad tools." continued...
But you could always try saving as both (using the same colour depth) and see which comes out smaller.
Of course, if you want to standardise on one graphic format for your site, PNG is likely to be the best one to use.
Personally I use gif's quite a bit for my images, as they work everywhere, obviously your transparency limitation is one key element that would direct someone towards a specific format.
I don't see any downfalls to using gif's.
If they get smaller and you have nothing to gain from using the features PNG offers (which is alpha channel transparency and more than 256 colors) then I see no reason why you should use PNG.
gif files will tend to be a little smaller since they don't support a transparency alpha channel (and maybe for some other reasons). Personally, I don't feel the size difference is really worth worrying about nearly as much as it used to. Most people are using the web with some sort of broadband now, so I doubt they will notice a difference.
It's probably more important to use the type of images that your manipulation tools work best with.
Plus, I like the ability to put an image on any background and have a drop shadow work, which points me more towards the png format.
I usually use gif's because of the size, but there is also png-8 which is 256 colours as well.
If you need fancy semi-transparent stuff then use png-24.
I usually use the 'save for web' feature in photoshop, which lets you fiddle with filetype, number of colours etc and see the result before you save. Of course I would use the smallest possible which still looks good in my eyes.
I use jpg for all non-transparent images. You can control the compression, which I like. I found this web site that compares the two. jpg is smaller and looks better.
Related
This question is about the design of SVG-fonts.
I am using some third-party SVG music fonts for an application. The single glyphs of these fonts, are by default very huge in size. I was wondering what the reason for this could be. I can think of, this allows to do more fine-tuning work while designing the fonts, and since they are of course scalable, they should be down-scaled as needed when I want to actually use them. Is this true, or are there some other points to consider?
Also when I use the path's data of single fonts (e.g. in a svg file) and open the svg file in Inkscape the symbols are upside-down, so I have to apply scale(1 -1) to all symbols. Is there a reason why these fonts are designed this way?
It will generally relate to the tool(s) they are using. Font editors commonly have a default em size of around 1000 units. The reason for that is likely because font files generally use integers, rather than floating point, for their glyph coordinates. And 1000 gives you a decent three digits of precision.
For instance have a look at a description of the OTF/TTF glyf table
Could anyone please explain briefly the difference between JPEG and EZW? And why JPEG is more popular? Is JPEG always better than EZW or just in most of the cases?
Thank you very much!
EZW is a theoretical technique which can be used as one step in wavelet compression. It's not a complete image encoder, and can't be used on its own. As best I can tell, nobody has proposed any image formats which depend on EZW, so nothing uses it (to the best of my knowledge).
(As an aside, wavelet image compression techniques have generally proven unsuccessful.)
JPEG, by contrast, is a standard which encompasses all layers of an image compressor, including the DCT as well as everything surrounding it: color space, entropy coding, file format, metadata, etc. Unlike EZW, it's been a complete, usable standard since 1992.
I'm starting to venture out from using jpeg and gif files to png, I was wondering if there were any standards for using png beside IE's lack of support for it. I also want to know if there was any current articles about setting I should be using when optimizing for web? Right now I'm using photoshop to do this, should I be using firework instead?
Which optimizations you use depends on the type of image. If your image contains only few colors, you might use png-8, otherwise you may need png-24. Same goes for the use of transparency/alpha blending.
The Photoshop save for web-feature does a fine job, but when your website has a lot of visitors, you may benefit from using PNGCrush for further compressing your images. You can use the YSlow plugin for FireFox to test how much bandwidth you can save by crushing your images.
Also, you can make use of CSS-sprites if your design allows it. This can result in less (but larger) images and therefore less requests and sometimes less bandwidth. But this doen't depend on the type of images you use.
Png is supported by IE, by the way. Only the alpha-transparency is not supported by IE 6, but there are CSS/Javascript trics to work around that, although they do not work for background images.
I wouldn't quit using jpg. Jpg is very useful when it comes to pictures. Png files are convenient for small images like buttons, graphical elements, and for images with large plain areas, like screenshots.
Let me describe the "battlefield" of my task:
Multi-room audio/video chat with more than 1M users;
Custom Direct3D renderer;
What I need to implement is a TextOverVideo feature. The Text itself goes via network and is to be rendered on the recipient side with Direct3D renderer. AFAIK, it is commonly used in game development to create your own texture with letters/numbers and draw this items. Because our application must support many languages, we ought to use a standard. That's why I've been working with ID3DXFont interface but I've found out some unsatisfied limitations.
What I've faced is a lack of scalability. E.g. if user is resizing video window I have to RE-create D3DXFont with new D3DXFONT_DESC while he's doing that. I think it is unacceptable.
That is why the ONLY solution I see (due to my skills) is somehow render the text to a texture and therefore draw sprite with scaling, translation etc.
So, I'm not sure if I go into the correct direction. Please help with advice, experience, literature, sources...
Your question is a bit unclear. As I understand it, you want easily scalable font.
I think it is unacceptable
As far as I know, this is standard behavior for fonts - even for system fonts. They aren't supposed to be easily scalable.
Possible solutions:
Use ID3DXRenderTarget for rendering text onto texture. Font will be filtered when you scale it up too much. Some people will think that it looks ugly.
Write custom library that supports vector fonts. I.e. - it should be able to extract font outline from font, and build text from it. It will be MUCH slower than ID3DXFont (which is already slower than traditional "texture" fonts). Text will be easily scalable. Using this way, you are very likely to get visible artifacts ("noise") for small text. I wouldn't use that approach unless you want huge letters (40+ pixels). Freetype library may have functions for processing font outlines.
Or you could try using D3DXCreateText. This will create 3D text for ONE string. Won't be fast at all.
I'd forget about it. As long as user is happy about overall performance, improving font rendering routines (so their behavior looks nice to you) is not worth the effort.
--EDIT--
About ID3DXRenderTarget.
EVen if you use ID3DXRenderTarget, you'll need ID3DXFont. I.e. you use ID3DXFont to render text onto texture, and then use texture to blit text onto screen.
Because you said that performance is critical, you can delay creation of new ID3DXFont until user stops resizing video. I.e. When user starts resizing video, you use old font, but upscale it using texture. There will be filtering, of course. Once user stops resizing, you create new font when you have time. you probably can do that in separate thread, but I'm not sure about it. OR you could simply always render text in the same resolution as video. This way you won't have to worry about resizing it (it still will be filtered - along with the video). Some video players work this way.
Few more things about ID3DXFont. There is one problem with ID3DXFont - it is slow in situations where you need a lot of text (but you still need it, because it supports unicode, and writing texturefont with unicode support is pain). Last time I worked with it I optimized things by caching commonly used strings in the textures. I.e. any string that was drawn more than 3 frames in the row were rendered onto D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8 texture/render target, and then I've been copying that string from texture instead of using ID3DXFont. Strings that weren't rendered for a while, were removed from texture. That gave some serious boost. This solution, however is tricky - monitoring empty space in the texture, removing unused strings, and defragmenting the texture isn't exactly trivial (there is nothing exceptionally complicated, but it is easy to make a mistake). You won't need such complicated system unless your screen is literally covered by text.
ID3DXFont fonts are flat, always parallel to the screen. D3DXCreateText are meshes that can be scaled and rotated.
Texture fonts are fuzzy and don't look very clear. Not good for an app that uses lots of small text.
I am writing an app that can create 500 text meshes, each mesh averaging 3,000-5,000 vertices. The text meshes are created once, then are static. I get 700 fps on a GeForce 8800.
Since I'm always sticking to CSS 2, it was a (pleasant) surprise for me today to find out that CSS 3 supports alpha channels in colors. That allows for a nice range of effects. But - which browsers (and from what version) support this? Is it safe to use this today, or are we better off by still making a 1x1px png image and adding the IE6-filter-hack?
Here is an article detailing support for that in various browsers.
You probably should do this with a PNG image and fall back to something reasonable for IE 6. And you don't want that PNG image to be 1×1 px² large because tiling such very small images is painfully slow in some rendering engines. Making the image 100×100 px² doesn't cost you anything :-)