XCF
From Free net encyclopedia
- XCF is also an abbreviation for eXperimental Computing Facility, which is also the origin of the use of the name for the file format.
The XCF file format is the native image format of the GIMP image-editing program. It supports saving each layer, the current selection, channels, transparency, paths and guides. However, the undo history is not saved in an XCF file.
The image data saved are compressed only by a simple RLE algorithm, but GIMP supports compressed files, using either gzip or bzip2. The compressed files can be opened as normal image files.
The XCF file format is mostly backward compatible. For example, GIMP 2.0 can save text in text layers while GIMP 1.2 can not. Text layers saved in GIMP 2.0 will open as ordinary image layers in GIMP 1.2.
The Gimp developers have deliberately not published a specification document for the XCF format, in an attempt to safeguard the possibility of doing minor format changes in future versions. Thus the souce code of the Gimp itself (which is freely available) is the only documentation of the format.
Software support
There are very few programs besides the Gimp that are capable of writing XCF files, but some image viewers and conversion software can read the format with varying degrees of success:
- ImageMagick has an XCF reader module that can read single-layer non-indexed images.
- ShowImg can display multi-layer non-indexed images.
- Gwenview can display multi-layer non-indexed images.
- GImageView [1] can display multi-layer non-indexed images.
- XnView [2] can display single-layer non-indexed images.