[PNG icon] PNG Documentation

The original specification for PNG was written by Thomas Boutell and Tom Lane, with contributions by many others. On 15 January 1997 it was released by the IETF as RFC 2083. The new sections in version 1.1 of the spec were largely written by Adam Costello and Glenn Randers-Pehrson; it was released by the PNG Development Group on 31 December 1998. Here is a brief summary of the changes in 1.1:

A complete list of the technical changes, in plain ASCII format, is also available. In addition, on 9 February 1999 the iTXt chunk was approved for inclusion in the core specification and will appear in version 1.2; in the meantime it is included in the PNG Extensions document (see below). All PNG 1.x versions are backward compatible, and there are currently no plans for a PNG 2.0 spec.

Copies of the PNG specification, both version 1.1 and version 1.0, can be found at the sites listed below. The related zlib and deflate specifications can be found at the locations listed on the zlib documentation page, and the draft MNG and JNG specifications can be found on the MNG documentation page.

Note that the US (Virginia) links should work again as of late April 1999; UUNET's new ftp server is finally online and seems to be mirroring SwRI correctly.

PNG specification, version 1.1 [New!]

* HTML format, multi-page:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp and in a tar.gz archive)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* HTML format, single page:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp and in HTML 2.0 format)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* ASCII text:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp and in IETF format)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* US letter-size PostScript:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* Adobe PDF (converted by Vadim Pavlov / Private Document Centre):
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* UK (also via ftp)
* Russia

PNG specification, version 1.0 (RFC 2083)

* HTML format, multi-page:
* US (Massachusetts)
* French translation, mostly complete (France)

* HTML format, single page:
* US (Massachusetts)
* UK (also via ftp)

* ASCII text:
* UK (also via ftp)
* W3C copy (US East)
* IETF copy (US West)
* IETF copy (US Central)
* IETF copy (US East)
* IETF copy (Canada)
* IETF copy (UK)
* IETF copy (Italy)
* IETF copy (South Africa)
* IETF copy (Australia)
* IETF copy (Thailand)
* IETF copy (Japan)

* US letter-size PostScript:
* UK (also via ftp)
* W3C copy (US East)

* Adobe PDF (converted by Vadim Pavlov / Private Document Centre):
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* UK (also via ftp)
* Russia

PNG extension chunks, version 1.1.1 [New!]

* HTML format:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp and in HTML 2.0 format)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* ASCII text:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* US letter-size PostScript:
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* Adobe PDF (converted by Vadim Pavlov / Private Document Centre):
* US (California) or local mirror site (also via ftp)
* UK (also via ftp)
* Russia

The ISO 8859-1 character set (also known as ``Latin-1'') is used by both PNG and MNG.

ISO 8859-1 character set

* Plain text:
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* PNG image (721 x 785; 8238 bytes):
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

* GIF image (721 x 785; 23495 bytes):
* US (Texas)
* US (Virginia)
* UK (also via ftp)

The specifications for MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphics) and JNG (JPEG Network Graphics) have moved to their own page.

Here are the other PNG-related resources at this site:

Last modified 29 April 1999 by newt@pobox.com , you betcha.

Copyright © 1996-1999 Greg Roelofs.