Comments on: The GIMP’s XCF file format

By: Boudewijn

Boudewijn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

David!

Please don’t even suggest that the idea for an OpenRaster format originates with Robin Rowe. It’s my and Cyrille Berger’s idea and project and it has nothing to do with Robin Rowe. He is not the source; we are.

We would like everyone to cooperate on an OpenRaster document specification — a specification for a file format that is compatible with OpenDocument and flexible enough to work for Gimp, Krita and any other layered raster image application. Everyone, including the Gimp people, the Cinepaint people and everyone else who’s interested. This is not an attempt to

I’m working on a document that describes our plans, and we discuss our ideas pretty regularly with Oyvind Kolas and are grateful for his expert help and input.

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Boudewijn,

That wasn’t my intention – my inte,ntion was to show that the idea that the GIMP’s file format is deliberately undocumented comes from Robin Rowe.

Dave.

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ambiguity removed.

By: Boudewijn

Boudewijn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oops — something went wrong here. I wanted to say in the second paragraph “This is not an attempt to blacken XCF — but an attempt to come to a concensus about a real layered raster image interchange file format.”

By: Boudewijn

Boudewijn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks!

By: Michael Schumacher

Michael Schumacher — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Um, Dave… did you ask anyone from the GIMP team before you wrote this blog entry? IMO this attempt of clearing things up does more harm than good.

By: Bruce D'Arcus

Bruce D'Arcus — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

FWIW, I really, really like the basic approach of using ODF is a container for the raster file format. I’m on the ODF TC, and want to also point out another bit that would have relevance, which is that we are planning greatly enhanced metadata support for ODF 1.2. It *may* use XMP, or be a richer subset.

By: Sven Neumann

Sven Neumann — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The problem with libxcf is that it would have to include large parts of the GIMP core. Simply because the XCF file format is so tightly bound to GIMP internals; internals that noone wants to see exposed. That’s the reason why XCF is the wrong format for exchanging image data between applications.

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Sven,

I agree – libxcf would be mostly inappropriate as a solution to data interchange, but it might have made things easlier for (say) seashore or krita (or even Cinepaint) to use the format, and keep up to date with version changes – knowing that their internal image structures are going to mostly mirror ours. Plus, it would be a nice facility for someone writing an xcf2psd converter or something like that. Also, ideally, you could choose to have a handle to the native structure, or a pre-flattened bitmap from the load routine, like in ImageMagick.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A spartan 3 page text file is an acceptable format documentation? come on…