Choosing The Right File Format/Quick Guide

Quick Guide to recommended formats For an explanation of terminology read the section "Formats for storing electronic information". Data Type Preferred formats Common OpenSource applications Common proprietary applications Documents Plain text, encoded with either ASCII (limited to the English alphabet) or Unicode UTF-8 RTF (Rich Text Format) - Proprietary, open specification by Microsoft PDF (Portable Document Format) - Proprietary, open specification by Adobe EPS (Encapsulated Post Script) - Proprietary, open specification by Adobe OOXML aka DOCX (Office Open XML) - controversially non-proprietary, open specification by Ecma International and ISO/IEC ODF (OpenDocument Format) - non-proprietary, open specification by OASIS and ISO Notepad++, gedit, kate, AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, KWord, PDFCreator, Geany, vim, emacs Notepad, Adobe Acrobat, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Star Office Spreadsheets ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) - non-proprietary, open specification by OASIS and ISO OOXML aka XLSX (Office Open XML) - controversially non-proprietary, open specification by Ecma International and ISO/IEC CSV (Comma Separated Values) - Non-standard conventional format where a comma is used to separate each value OpenOffice.org Calc, Lotus 1-2-3, Gnumeric, KSpread Microsoft Excel, Corel Quattro Pro Web pages HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XML (eXtensible Markup Language) - Non-proprietary, open specifications by W3C Abiword, OpenOffice2.0, Mozilla composer, Quanta, Geany Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive Graphics (raster & vector) PNG (Portable Network Graphic) - non-proprietary, open specification. Released as ISO/IEC 15948:2003 and W3C recommendation (ref) JPEG/JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) Non-proprietary, open specification by the Joint Photographic Experts Group DjVuLibre (pronounced "déjà vu") Non-proprietary, open specification by lizardtech CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) - Non-proprietary, open specification by ISO/IEC SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) - Non-proprietary, open specification by W3C VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) - Non-proprietary, open specification by W3C DXF (Drawing eXchange Format) - Proprietary, partially open specification by Autodesk Gimp, TuxPaint, OpenOffice.org Draw, Blender, Inkscape, krita, kolourpaint Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, 3DStudioMax, AutoCAD Audio Audio has containers with codecs in together they form a format. Ogg container with vorbis, flac, speex and others Flac container with flac audio. MP3 Can contain mp3 audio. Audacity, Ardour Adobe Soundbooth Video Video also has containers with codecs in together they form a format. Ogg container with Theora WebM container with VP8 video compression format and vorbis audio compression format MP4 container with h.264 video compression format and mp3 audio compression format Openshot , KDEnlive Adobe Premiere , Windows Movie Maker Database Databases do not use files in the normal sense, however a good database can output its content structured with SQL (Structured Query Language) - an ANSI/ISO standard. It is also important that it supports ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird and InterBase, Kexi Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase Encrypted files OpenPGP - Non-proprietary, open specification, OpenSSL GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)