Need to support common image formats but can't find a library to read/write them all in a simple and consistent manner? You can stop looking now.

Overview

D-Type External Format Plugin is a fast and flexible plugin that allows its clients to read and write common image and/or data compression formats, such as PNG, JPEG, GZIP/ZLIB and SVG Native. There are two main types of clients that can use this plugin:

• D-Type PowerDoc Engine — Certain OpenType fonts represent color glyphs using bitmap images. These images are typically embedded in font files in PNG and/or JPEG format. In order for D-Type PowerDoc Engine to render those glyphs, PNG or JPEG images must first be decoded on the fly. This task is performed by D-Type External Format Plugin.

• Your Own Application(s) — You might want to read/write PNG, JPEG, GIF or GZIP compression formats yourself. In this situation, you will want to access the External Format Plugin C/C++ API directly, so that you can read and write these files programmatically. The External Format Plugin API is designed to make this task very easy while producing identical results on all supported platforms.

Note that if D-Type External Format Plugin is used solely to provide D-Type PowerDoc Engine with image decoding capabilities, you don't have to access its C/C++ API directly. Simply add the plugin to your source project, let D-Type Engine use it, and forget it.

D-Type External Format Plugin allows D-Type PowerDoc Engine to decode PNG and JPEG images stored in OpenType fonts.

Specifications

Currently D-Type External Format Plugin supports the following file formats.

In the future, D-Type External Format Plugin might be updated to provide support for other required external graphics formats, such as TIFF or PDF. Support for these external formats will always be provided outside of core D-Type Engines.