On 13/02/2020 13:54, Mayayana wrote:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Java Jive said he used Paint Shop Pro to add some "information" to a
| .png, and since he said he found the "strings" in the file afterwards, I
| presume he meant text. I think I have PSP somewhere (IIRR even a Big
| Version they made available when they wanted to close down servers or
| something, though that may be something else), but it seems a bit of a
| sledgehammer to load it just for this.

Yes, I added two strings into two of the four fields offered under View,
Image Information, Creator Information, (but the menu path is probably
different in different versions of PSP) which are ...
Image Title I put something here
Artist Name
Copyright
Description I put something else here
.... and I could see the results in a hexadecimal disply of the image
file, but, as already indicated, not in Windows File Explorer or Windows
Image Viewer (W7 HP versions).

I'm surprised you care about this. I have a hard time even
finding a PNG on my drives. The only ones I have are charts
that I downloaded from webpages. Few suites use them because
they're big. A JPG can show a photo image much smaller. A
GIF can show a chart much smaller.

As you indicated further on in a part I snipped because I've nothing
further to add to it, the difference is in the compression: PNG is a
lossless format, others such a JPEG are lossy, and the difference can be
important. So, for example, it used to be that BBC used JPEGs for their
images in their news pages, but they were so compressed to hell that you
couldn't actually see much in them, and if they were graphs, forget
trying to read the legend or the scales! Haven't had cause to examine
one closely recently, so don't know what their current standards are.
For this reason, when I put something up on my site where detail is
important, invariably I use PNG.

As some here, and in some other ngs, may know and recall, over the last
year or so I have scanned my way through a trunk full of ancient
Macfarlane documents that have come down through my family over many
generations, some of them so old as even to be parchments on animal
skin. I have use PNGs exclusively for this work, and in fact use them
almost universally for anything that I produce.

I really don't understand
why anyone uses PNG online. One could use PNG for compressed
images on disk, but for that there's TIF.

TIFF files are *MUCH* bigger than PNG, for example 22.1Mb as opposed to
8.24MB for the same picture.