Image and icon file formats

There are many file formats used for storing images and icons. Common Graphics provides several classes for reading and writing standard file formats. The following image file formats are supported:

Table 23. Supported image file formats

Format	Description
Windows BMP	Native format for the Windows platform
TIFF	Portable format, supported by many tools on different platforms
PCX	Common file format on PC platforms
GIF	Graphical Interchange Format File
JPEG	Joint Photographic Experts Group File
PNG	Portable Network Graphics

The following icon file formats are supported:

Table 24. Supported icon file formats

Format	Description
Windows ICO	Native format for the Windows platform
PNG	Portable Network Graphics

The following table shows the class hierarchy that implements the file format framework of Common Graphics. This framework provides methods to load and unload images and icons in these formats, to test whether a file has a given format, and to detect what the format of a given file is.

Table 25. File format class hierarchy

Class	Description.
CgFileFormat	Abstract file format class
CgIconFileFormat	Abstract icon file format class
CgPMICOFileFormat	PM ICO file format
CgWinICOFileFormat	Windows ICO file format
CgImageFileFormat	Abstract image file format class
CgGIFFileFormat	GIF file format
CgJPEGFileFormat	JPEG file format
CgPCXFileFormat	PCX file format
CgPNGFileFormat	PNG file format
CgTIFFFileFormat	TIFF file format
CgWinBMPFileFormat	Windows BMP file format

In addition to loading from files and unloading into files, Common Graphics provides methods to load from ByteArrays and unload into ByteArrays. Error handling methods are also provided. These methods are described in the following sections.