PNG File Format
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The Black Ice Printer Drivers can convert any printable file into a variety of formats, including PNG.

The PNG file format was created by CompuServe and is intended to provide a portable, legally unencumbered, simple, lossless, streaming-capable, well-compressed, well-specified standard for bitmapped image files which gives new features to the end user at minimal cost to the developer. The PNG file format, while not extremely more powerful then GIF compression, is said to replace GIFs in the future as more and more applications start to support it.

Web designers can expect an improvement over GIFs in transparency capabilities, cross platform gamma correction and two-dimensional interlaving. On the down side, PNGs are not designed to support multiple images or animated images while GIF does support these features.

Image editors may also benefit from the PNG compression over TIFF files because of it’s compression algorithm which is lossless in nature. Also, if the PNG file format is supported by a product, it will be viewable and editable in any application which supports PNG, which is not the case with TIFF files.

The PNG files format supports: 1, 4, 8, 24 bits per pixel.

PNG support is included in the following Black Ice printer drivers: