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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Studying Cases - Case Study: SNG

Case Study: SNG

The program sng translates between PNG format and an all-text representation of it (SNG or Scriptable Network Graphics format) that can be examined and modified with an ordinary text editor. Run on a PNG file, it produces an SNG file; run on an SNG file, it recovers the equivalent PNG. The transformation is 100% faithful and lossless in both directions.

In syntactic style, SNG resembles CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), another language for controlling presentation of graphics; this makes at least a gesture in the direction of the Rule of Least Surprise. Here is a test example:

The point of this tool is to enable users to edit various obscure PNG chunk types that are not necessarily supported by conventional graphics editors. Rather than writing special-purpose code to grovel through the PNG binary format, the user can simply flip an image into an all-text representation, edit that, and massage it back. Another potential application is in making images amenable to version control; under most version-control systems, text files are much easier to manage than binary blobs, and diff operations on SNG representations actually have some possibility of yielding useful information.

The gains here go beyond the time not spent writing special-purpose code for manipulating binary PNGs, however. The code of the sng program itself is not especially transparent, but it promotes transparency in larger systems of programs by making the entire contents of PNGs discoverable.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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