
PNG format co-designer Glenn Randers-Pehrson has died - binarycrusader
https://sourceforge.net/p/png-mng/mailman/message/36447670/
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ioquatix
Oh wow.

I was working with Glenn on GitHub and I didn't know.

[https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/pull/177](https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/pull/177)
was my last interaction with him. He seemed to really care about libpng and
making it better.

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devwastaken
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.

Thank you Glenn.

~~~
tinus_hn
PNG is basically zip with some extra tricks. The advantage in PNG is not how
well it compresses.

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vanderZwan
> _PNG is basically zip with some extra tricks._

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](https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-
Filters.html)

[1]
[https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipn...](https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipng)

~~~
tinus_hn
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.

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dopeboy
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.

RIP.

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classichasclass
I was always impressed at the level of legacy support in libpng. Even 1.0.x
still gets security updates now and then.

RIP and a job well done.

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arunmp
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.

~~~
a1369209993
> they seem to be almost lossless

The should be just plain (completely) lossless unless your image encoder is
doing something evil behind your back.

~~~
gwbas1c
I thought there are "lossy" encoders that do things like dither and reduce the
colorspace?

~~~
gpvos
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.

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danso
This appears to be his LinkedIn page: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-
randers-pehrson-77110a101/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenn-randers-
pehrson-77110a101/)

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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joe_momma
Was first exposed to .PNG in Macromedia Fireworks. Have loved it more than the
other extensions ever since.

~~~
oliveshell
Me too— I thought it was cool how Fireworks used PNG as its native format,
with extra metadata to keep layers and text editable.

Thanks Glenn; I still export to PNG all the time.

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chris_wot
The very first PNG image is no more. It points to this:

[http://homepages.rpi.edu/~randeg/paleo_pngs.html](http://homepages.rpi.edu/~randeg/paleo_pngs.html)

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Mononokay
Huh, right next to the death of Todd Boll. Really sad day today.

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maxst
Rest in peace, Glenn.

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thelossfulmany
Losslessness at rest we salute you.

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downandout
Is there some reason we don't have a black bar on HN for this? Given the
ubiquity of the PNG format, I would think his death is deserving of it. RIP.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Usually they're for household names ("household" within our industry anyway).
That said, maybe we'll get one once the admins wake up. :)

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NL807
Thanks for all the work Glenn.

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edoceo
This and Todd, can we get the black bar (or did I miss it?)

~~~
acct1771
...

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TwoBit
I don't like the way libpng dumps all the package code into a single
directory. Internal headers, public headers, source, and samples.

