Image formats
WebCharts3D can produce charts' images in the following formats:
PNG | (Portable Network Graphics). |
The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format provides a portable, legally
unencumbered, well-compressed, well-specified standard for lossless bitmapped
image files. It produces the images compatible in size with GIF images and is
supported by all major browsers, including Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer
3.0. WebCharts3D's PNG implementation supports non-interlaced 1,2,4 and 8 depth indexed color models as well as 24 bit true color model. The indexed color models uses 'depth' bits to represent a pixel's color and can support 2N colors, where N is the depth of the image, and can provide up to 256 colors. True color model uses 3 bytes to represent red, green, and blue components of the pixel and can provide up to 224 distinct colors. The color model used for the image is selected automatically based on the number of colors used in the chart. By ensuring that a chart has less than 257 colors, you can reduce the size of the uncompressed image bits by a factor of three. |
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JPEG | (Joint Photographic Experts Group). |
The JPEG implementation in the WebCharts uses JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) that implements lossy compression of the original image. JPEG format is not suited well for the transmitting charts images and produces larger files with potentially lower quality. In order to request JPEG format you need to specify JPG as the image type. | |
GIF | (Graphical Interchange Format) |
GIF is next to PNG in the image compression ratio and is generally good for the charts, even though it imposes a limit of 256 colors per image. However, due to the UNISYS patent on LZW, this file format is disabled in the current version. Please contact us if you are interested in the GIF-enabled version of the software. | |
WBMP | (Wireless BitMap Format) |
The WBMP format enables graphical information to be sent to a variety of handsets. Please see WBMP page for more information. | |
SWF | (Macromedia Flash movie) |
SFW files store commands for the Flash plugin rather than the image pixels themselves. This is a very efficient format, especially for the large charts, and it produces better quality images. WebCharts3D provides support for producing multi-frame animated charts in this format. | |
SVG | (Adobe Scaleable Vector Graphics) |
SVG files store XML statements for the Adobe plugin rather than the image pixels themselves. WebCharts' SVG implementation produces XML in the compressed form (SVGZ). | |
(Adobe Portable Document Format) | |
PDF files store PDF statements for the Adobe plugin rather than the image pixels themselves. This format is convinient when you are planning to include the chart into other PDF documents. Note that the interactivity is not available with PDF charts. | |
TIFF | (Tag Image File Format) |
TIFF is an image format that has been around for some time and was the cross-platform image format by choice until PNG was introduced. Since none of the popular browsers can display TIFFs without plugins and these plugins do not support interactivity, this format is rarely used for displaying web images. In order to request TIFF format you need to specify TIF as the image type. |