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> Today’s Tedium discusses 10 image formats that time forgot. > (list includes BMP, TIFF, TGA) I remember seeing lots of software using Quicktime PICT files,
by theandrewbailey 5y ago
> Today’s Tedium discusses 10 image formats that time forgot.
> (list includes BMP, TIFF, TGA)
I remember seeing lots of software using Quicktime PICT files, even on Windows, but I've never seen anyone break it down (Wikipedia does a bit[0]). Did everyone mostly use it as a container for JPEGs?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICT
- jsrcout 5y agoPICT, there's a blast from the past. Way back at my first job I ported our visual graph editor to the Macintosh. Scrolling was very slow at first due to continuously redrawing the graph, until I started saving it to a PICT as a sort of cache. Worked great, the Mac could draw a PICT very quickly.
- duskwuff 5y agoPICT was a really weird format. It's a stream of drawing instructions for Apple's old QuickDraw graphics layer. This could include bitmap graphics, but could also include (semi-)vector operations like drawing lines, circular arcs, polygons, or text.
- jandrese 5y agoOf course this means making a third party reader means re-implementing QuickDraw and probably getting some nastygrams from Apple's lawyers.
- duskwuff 5y agoApple wouldn't care. QuickDraw doesn't exist in current versions of macOS -- Preview.app can't even display them. I've actually toyed with the idea of a PICT to SVG conversion tool. It's potentially useful for viewing certain old documents in the (long obsolete) Apple DocViewer format.