
Farbfeld image format - setra
http://tools.suckless.org/farbfeld/
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greenyoda
_" Current image formats have integrated compression, making it complicated to
read the image data. One is forced to use complex libraries like libpng,
libjpeg, libjpeg-turbo, giflib and others, read the documentation and write a
lot of boilerplate in order to get started.

Farbfeld leaves this behind and is designed to be as simple as possible,
leaving the task of compression to external tools. The simple design, which
was the primary objective, implicitly leads to the very good compression
characteristics, as it often happens when you go with the UNIX philosophy.
Reading farbfeld images doesn’t require any special libraries. The tools are
just a toolbox to make it easy to convert between common image formats and
farbfeld."_

Using standard external tools (e.g., bzip2) to compress an easy-to-process
image format is such a simple and elegant idea that I'm surprised nobody has
thought of it before. This allows you to easily write a bunch of filters (see
"farbfeld utilities") that you can apply to images using a simple Unix
pipeline.

