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Question about PNGOUTWin

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• Maren at 2006-08-19 16:29
  Is there a setting that prevents the program from wrtting files bigger than the original?,
  Thanks in advance.
• David at 2006-08-19 22:10

  Re: Question about PNGOUTWin

  Is there a setting that prevents the program from wrtting files bigger than the original?,
  Thanks in advance.

  Thank you for your interest in PNGOUTWin.
  
  PNGOUTWin will not overwrite the original PNG file if the result of the trial is larger.
  
  If the output setting would result in the creation of a new file and the source PNG is smaller than the compression result, then the source PNG file is copied.
  
  Please let me know if this isn't happening. If there is a specific case where you would like to see similar behavior, then please provide details for the case you have in mind.
• Maren at 2006-08-20 04:24

  Question about PNGOUTWin

  Well, I never really stated that the source file was being overwritten, it's just that PNGOUTWin may write output files which are bigger than the source one and that's not exactly useful if you ask me.
  
  Here are the settings I used:
  
  http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/4561/setupve6.png
  
  Here is my BMP source file which's 17.6 KB (18,038 bytes): http://dl031.filefactory.com/dl/f/10acc7/b/0/h/f6abf1265937b08a/
  
  And I'm gettin 4 output files as big as 18.0 KB (18,439 bytes)
• David at 2006-08-20 05:22

  Compression and output options

  There seem to be two questions here.
  
  First, is it useful to have PNG image files larger than their source file?
  Uncompressed PNG image files are frequently used in games for Java (J2ME) phones. PNGOUT has a large following among J2ME developers.
  The games are packaged in a JAR file, which is often compressed as well. The JAR may end up being smaller if all images in the file are uncompressed PNG images and the compression of the images is done across the JAR rather than within the images themselves. So yes, it is useful, and it is useful to a large number of people who use PNGOUT.
  
  The second question is whether there is an optimization that could be added to avoid writes in all cases where a new file would be created when the result is larger than the source file regardless of the source file's format. There isn't an option at this time for that, but I can see how that would be useful. With such a global setting, you would have to be prepared for the case where no trials end up with smaller files, and therefore a file is neither created nor copied. I'm not sure what the complete scenario is that you are working under, but would it be useful for your case to have a global setting that prevented writes of all PNG results that are larger than the source file regardless of its format, even if that means no file may be created at all? If so, then this could be easily added.
• David at 2006-08-27 06:22

  Added to 1.0.1

  I just released an update (1.0.1) that contains this new feature.