PNG - Ideas to Integrated Circuits

PNG-supporting Libraries and Toolkits
● FabPAINT [Fabrice Foray] (Win32) - all versions; write-only; uses libpng and zlib; freeware;
197k. (This is a drop-in replacement for the CAPAINT DLL, which appears to be part of the
commercial CA-Visual Objects product [and which itself may have been based on an old
version of Ulrich von Zadow's PaintLib, below]. In addition to PNG, it includes support for
TIFF and JPEG.)
● FreeImage [Floris van den Berg / Hervé Drolon] (Win32, Linux/Qt, Mac OS X) - all versions;
read/write; alpha support; MNG and JNG support (read-only) as of version 2.1.0; ICC profile
support as of version 3.2.0; 16-bps support as of version 3.7.0; uses libmng, libpng and zlib;
freeware (GPL or FIPL) with C++ source. (This is a library/DLL with support for reading and
writing multiple image formats, including PNG; it also has a growing number of imagemanipulation
capabilities. Ease of use has been a design goal.)
● FXPy [Lyle Johnson] (Win32, Unix, etc.) - version 0.99.118 and later; read/write? requires
libpng and zlib; freeware (LGPL) with source. (This is a "Python extension module that provides
an interface to the FOX GUI library.")
● gd [Thomas Boutell] (many) - version 1.6 and later (or version 1.2 or 1.3 with Greg's gd1.2-pngaddon
or gd1.3-png-addon); read/write; palette support only in versions prior to 2.0; nearly full
alpha support in version 2.0 and later (7 bits rather than 8; only binary transparency in earlier
versions); requires libpng and zlib; freeware (BSDish) with source. (This is a popular drawing
library written in C. Traditionally it was GIF-only, with PNG support planned for version 2.0, but
Unisys legal action in 1999 prompted the author [who was also leader of the original PNG
development effort] to add PNG to the 1.x series, replacing the old GIF support. Version 1.6 had
broken transparency and RGB support, no grayscale support, and in some cases wrote larger
palettes than it needed to, but those problems were fixed in 1.6.1 and later releases. Support for
JPEG and Windows BMP formats was added in version 1.8.)
● GDFP [Mike Bradbery] (many) - all versions; write-only; requires gd, libpng and zlib; freeware
(EFFL) with source. (This is a FreePascal interface to the gd library above.)
● GDI+ [Microsoft] (Win32, Win64) - all versions; read/write; commercial (incorporated into
Windows XP and later, and available as a downloadable add-on for apps targeted at Windows 98
and later). (This is the device-independent graphics API built into newer versions of Microsoft
Windows.)
● gdk-pixbuf [Federico Mena-Quintero and others] (Unix/GTK) - all versions; read-only? full
alpha support? requires libpng and zlib; freeware (LGPL) with source. (This is a GDK library
that can load various image formats and render them into various drawables and buffers with
optional scaling and compositing. Reportedly it will be integrated into GTK+ 1.4.)
http://libpng.org/pub/png/pngaptk.html (5 of 21)10/23/06 12:50 PM