PNG - Ideas to Integrated Circuits

PNG-supporting Libraries and Toolkits
used with Visual Basic, Visual C++, Access, Delphi, etc.)
● Img [Jan Nijtmans] (Unix/X, Win32) - version 1.0 and later; read/write; uses libpng and zlib;
freeware with source. (This is a multi-format image-processing extension for Tcl / Tk. Versions
of Tk prior to 8.3 required a patch in order to support the writing of alpha/transparency info; as of
version 8.3, the patch is integrated into the core package.)
● ImgDLL [Smaller Animals Software] (Win32) - version 3.7(?) and later; read/write; full alpha
and gamma support claimed; uses libpng and zlib; commercial. (This is a multi-format, filebased
image-processing DLL/LIB for use with VC++, Visual Basic, etc. It has been mostly
superseded by ImgSource, below.)
● ImgSource [Smaller Animals Software] (Win32) - all versions; read/write; full alpha and gamma
support claimed; uses libpng and zlib; commercial. (This is a multi-format image-processing
DLL/LIB for use with VC++, Visual Basic, etc. Unlike the older ImgDLL [above], ImgSource
can read images from and write them to arbitrary sources, and it has more processing functions.)
● ImgX [Designer Controls] (Win32) - all versions? read/write; commercial; requires separate
purchase of ImgSource, above. (This is an ActiveX DLL for Visual Basic that supports various
forms of image manipulation.)
● Imlib [Red Hat Advanced Development Labs, Enlightenment team] (Unix/X, Unix/GTK) - all
versions? read-only; partial alpha support (only binary transparency); requires libpng and zlib;
freeware (GPL) with source. (This is a "general image-loading and rendering library" that
transparently handles many formats without the need for the programmer to know any details of
the formats or of the interfaces to their programming libraries; claimed to be fast.)
● Io [Steve Dekorte] (Unix/X, Win32, Mac OS X) - version 2002-11-24 and later; read-only? uses
libpng and zlib; freeware (BSD) with source. (This is a "small prototype-based programming
language" [and desktop environment] inspired by SmallTalk and other object-oriented
languages.)
● janGraphics.dll [Jan Verhoeven] (Windows 9x/ME) - all versions? read/write; freeware. (This is
a "multi-threaded COM-object to convert between the [bmp,gif,png,jpg] image file formats,
including (optional) resizing, GIF transparency and JPEG compression quality adjustment." It
can be used with Visual Basic, Delphi, MS Office apps, etc.)
● Java Advanced Imaging API [Javasoft/Sun] (Java) - version EA2 and later; requires Java 2
SDK (a.k.a. JDK 1.2 or later); read/write; full alpha support; full gamma support; read/write
sRGB support (all gamma and chromaticity properties made available to app, but actual pixelmodification
is limited to gamma); no iCCP support. (This is native PNG support in a standard
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