Michael D Sullivan wrote:
But the GIF standard dates to 1987, and the PNG standard dates to 1996, so the latter probably takes advantage of post-87 technical advances (in addition to avoiding a patent issue). Without the detailed knowledge Rob Cole has, I would probably opt for PNG for line art, assuming a bitmapped format was needed, rather than a vector graphic format.
I think you pretty-much nailed it Micheal - gif is very fast to encode and decode (employs a very simple compression/de-compression algorithm), but the efficient of encoding (size efficiency I mean) varies wildly (and in a non-intuitive way, unless you understand the technical details) depending on the data. png is more like a zip compression, which takes more horsepower (compressing and decompressing) but compresses just about any kind of data pretty darn good, and much better than standard (baseline) tiff compression.
Here is some more info on png format:
http://www.scantips.com/basics9p.html
Cheers,
Rob