21 stories tagged file-formats, newest first.
21 points by TheWoollyBully | 77 comments
Personal blog essay by Joshua Morris arguing that operating systems should natively open, render, and edit Markdown files across computers, tablets, and phones.
29 points by jxmorris12 | 5 comments
A blog post walking through each step of decoding a PNG file, from chunk parsing through decompression and filtering, using an example image.
78 points by speckx | 15 comments
Blog post describing how the author got childhood Macromedia Director games running on modern hardware by working around old copy-protection mechanisms.
153 points by speckx | 73 comments
A blog post on Dead Parrot BBS arguing that plain text remains one of the most durable and useful computing technologies due to its longevity and openness.
646 points by vitaut | 65 comments
A blog post explaining how progressive JPEG scans work and experimenting with manipulating them to create 'regressive' JPEGs.
593 points by tosh | 126 comments
GitHub repository for F3, an open-source data file format presented at SIGMOD 2026 as a future successor to formats like Parquet.
577 points by whatisabcdefgh | 177 comments
SQLite documentation page explaining that SQLite is a US Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format for datasets, alongside XML, JSON, and CSV.
406 points by todsacerdoti | 79 comments
MapLibre blog post announcing MapLibre Tile (MLT), a new modern and efficient vector tile format.
462 points by icy | 207 comments
Dan Abramov's overreacted blog post "A Social Filesystem" uses the metaphor of files to explain user-owned social data, likely in the context of AT Protocol.
376 points by terrelln | 87 comments
Meta Engineering blog post introducing OpenZL, an open source format-aware data compression framework.
![Screenshot of db.cs.cmu.edu: F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2025/10/2/31749d51-afe4-455e-b01b-88af39f20fa8.jpg)
366 points by eatonphil | 117 comments
SIGMOD 2025 paper presenting F3, a next-generation open-source columnar data file format that embeds WebAssembly decoders for extensibility and interoperability.
369 points by UglyToad | 199 comments
Blog post by Eliot Jones explaining how PDF parsing should work per the spec, covering headers, cross-reference tables, object offsets and trailers, and its real-world pitfalls.
610 points by bluedel | 553 comments
A blog post announcing the release of a new PNG specification after two decades of stalled progress and explaining why it matters.
354 points by todsacerdoti | 149 comments
Homepage of DiffX, a proposed next-generation extensible diff file format that builds on unified diffs to carry richer metadata.
331 points by marcodiego | 159 comments
Homepage for Lottie, an open-source vector graphics animation file format originally created in 2015 for exporting and playing back Adobe After Effects animations.
417 points by desgeeko | 53 comments
Documentation page in the pdfsyntax GitHub repo describing a browse feature that renders a PDF file's internal structure as navigable HTML.
750 points by nickmain | 148 comments
Homepage for JSON Canvas, an open MIT-licensed file format for infinite canvas data originally created for Obsidian, with readme and version 1.0 spec.
447 points by jgrahamc | 188 comments
Blog post by John Graham-Cumming testing which modern software can open Tim Berners-Lee's original 1990 WWW proposal saved as a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file.
649 points by alexwlchan | 140 comments
Blog post by Alex Chan exploring the claimed maximum page size of PDF documents and creating a PDF with pages larger than Germany.
405 points by sohkamyung | 161 comments
A Mastodon post by an author on eldritch.cafe noting that LibreOffice opens old Microsoft Word files better than Word itself does.
404 points by weeber | 236 comments
SQLite essay presenting a thought experiment on how the OpenDocument Presentation format could benefit from being built on SQLite instead of ZIP archives.