Let's lose XCF!
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 3:07 am
Even Wikipedia knows about XnView's limits with regard to this format:
Years ago, I recall reading an interview Irfan Skiljan did with one of the veteran GIMP developers. This gentleman said that a filter or plug-in for the XCF format would be difficult to make, as there is always a little application code along with the image code in every XCF file created in the GIMP. (My simile for that is: "XCFs are like skin grafts taken from GIMP itself.") And you can prove this to your own satisfaction with a little experiment. Save an image in the GIMP with an active (visible -- "crawling ants" still in motion) selection. Quit the GIMP, then re-launch it and open the same XCF file. More likely than not, the selection will still be active.
Try that with a PSD in Photoshop. Unless something has changed dramatically since CS3 -- which was the last version I recall using extensively -- I don't think you'll see the ants crawling like you would with an XCF file in the GIMP.
For the time being, I'm willing to go along with the suggestion Pierre made in this thread. But I do hope he will consider the points I made above, and remove XCF as a "supported" format in future versions of XnView across the board (ie, MP included).
I've spoken about this discrepancy before, briefly, here.
BZT
I think most people who use the GIMP consider XCF to be the GIMP team's answer to Adobe Photoshop's PSD format. More than likely, they save their XCF files as multiple layers. If all XnView is able to display are single-layer (what I like to refer to as "closed") XCF files, and just about every other kind display incorrectly, what is the point of including this format in XnView?XnView can display single-layer non-indexed images.
Years ago, I recall reading an interview Irfan Skiljan did with one of the veteran GIMP developers. This gentleman said that a filter or plug-in for the XCF format would be difficult to make, as there is always a little application code along with the image code in every XCF file created in the GIMP. (My simile for that is: "XCFs are like skin grafts taken from GIMP itself.") And you can prove this to your own satisfaction with a little experiment. Save an image in the GIMP with an active (visible -- "crawling ants" still in motion) selection. Quit the GIMP, then re-launch it and open the same XCF file. More likely than not, the selection will still be active.
Try that with a PSD in Photoshop. Unless something has changed dramatically since CS3 -- which was the last version I recall using extensively -- I don't think you'll see the ants crawling like you would with an XCF file in the GIMP.
For the time being, I'm willing to go along with the suggestion Pierre made in this thread. But I do hope he will consider the points I made above, and remove XCF as a "supported" format in future versions of XnView across the board (ie, MP included).
I've spoken about this discrepancy before, briefly, here.
BZT