PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Specification, Tenth Draft

Revision date: 5 May, 1995

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1. Introduction

The PNG format is intended to provide a portable, legally unencumbered, well-compressed, well-specified standard for lossless bitmapped image files.

Although the initial motivation for developing PNG was to replace GIF, the design provides some useful new features not available in GIF, with minimal cost to developers.

GIF features retained in PNG include:

Important new features of PNG, not available in GIF, include: PNG is intended to be: The main part of this specification simply gives the definition of the file format. An appendix gives the rationale for many design decisions. Although the rationale is not part of the formal specification, reading it may help implementors to understand the design. Cross-references in the main text point to relevant parts of the rationale.

See Rationale: Why a new file format?, Why these features?, Why not these features?, Why not use format XYZ?.

Pronunciation

PNG is pronounced "ping".

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