Category Archives: Links

JHOVE webinar

Posted on November 18, 2017 | Comments Off on JHOVE webinar

An Open Preservation Foundation webinar, “Putting JHOVE to the acid test: A PDF test-set for well-formedness validation in JHOVE,” will be held on November 21, 10 AM GMT (that’s 11 AM in Central Europe and a ludicrous 5 AM or earlier in the US).
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Aside

This XKCD cartoon showed up in my Twitter feed more times in one day than any previous one, for reasons that should be obvious.

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Posted on November 1, 2017

The little-known potential of SVG

Posted on September 27, 2016 | 2 comments

Today on Twitter I came upon an article, “SVG Has More Potential,” by Mike Riethmuller. He points out that SVG is more than just “scalable vector graphics,” and he demonstrates that its images can be responsive.
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A Libtiff mirror

Posted on September 9, 2016 | 2 comments

Libtiff is still offline at remotesensing.org, but there’s a mirror of the source available on GitHub. I held off on mentioning it in this blog till Bob Friesenhahn confirmed it’s reliable.

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File format analysis tools for archivists

My article on “File Format Analysis Tools for Archivists” is up on LWN.net.

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Posted on June 3, 2016 in Links

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XKCD on digital preservation

Posted on May 20, 2016 | Comments Off on XKCD on digital preservation

Today’s XKCD comic comments on digital preservation in Randall Munroe’s usual style.
XKCD cartoon on Digital Data
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Aside

I’ve now got a Facebook page on Mad File Format Science. I’m really not enthusiastic about Facebook at all, but it seems that it should be part of my Web presence.

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Posted on January 19, 2016

A link roundup on file formats

Posted on November 12, 2015 | Comments Off on A link roundup on file formats

3D printing is an exciting new technology, but the formats to choose from are an alphabet soup.

A call for “PDF 2.0” or an “Analytical File Format.” The description is vague, but it sounds like something analogous to the Semantic Web for documents.

BW64, a new RIFF-based audio format. The article describes it as a “3D” format, but more significantly it’s a metadata-rich interchange format that supports really big files.

And just for bitter laughs: I need a ‘file’ format.”

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“Can I use?”

Posted on September 24, 2015 | Comments Off on “Can I use?”

I just came across caniuse.com, where Alexis Deveria maintains information on browser support for various Web features. This looks like a nice resource on how widely formats are being adopted.

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Charles Stross on Microsoft Word

Posted on October 21, 2013 | Comments Off on Charles Stross on Microsoft Word

Not many people are brilliant writers and also have the technical knowledge to comment on file formats intelligently. When it does happen, it’s worth reading. So I recommend to you Why Microsoft Word Must Die by Charles Stross.

I’ve been on a digital preservation panel with Stross, and he can talk as expertly on the subject as I can. When it comes to Word, he knows a lot more about the format than I do, and he can demolish it more eloquently than I could even if I had the same level of knowledge.

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