ScriptPNG
Posted by datonn on November 10th, 2009Parlez-vous français?
I personally don’t speak French well at all (other than knowing that when I get into trouble, I need to spend some quality time on the Google Translate web site). However, a recent comment on one of my blog postings lead me to find out about a French-language web page on the CSS-IG.net web site that makes me want to take a class or two.
That page described a PNGSlim-like command-line .png optimization tool called ScriptPNG. According to that page (and Google Translate):
“The ScriptPNG allows conversion of BMP, GIF, TGA, PCX, TIF, TIFF, PNM, PBM, PGM to PNG one or several images in one cycle, and optimizing PNG images. To do this, move your images in the folder scriptpng, Execute the ScriptPNG, and choose the value:
1 Optimize PNG lossless (fast): The optimization allows the rapid conversion of input formats, and “clean” output formats, eliminating unnecessary information for the Web and applying optimization techniques without losses.
2 Optimizing PNG lossless (Complete): The optimization includes the full functionality of the optimization faster, but testing different strategies compression stronger and can better optimize any images to colors, such as degraded.
3 Change in Paletted PNG (PNG-8, web): PNG conversion Paletted strength up to 256 colors in the image from the original image. Can obtain significant gains weight, but may cause visual degradation. The image is then optimized with option 2 automatically.”
Option 2 seems to be the most desirable (most powerful, without the risk of visual degradation), so I grabbed 20 .png images from the “root” images directory on our mapformation.com web site to see what ScriptPNG might do. The need to have to copy files into the ScriptPNG root directory to optimize them was a bit of a hassle. However, that negative was quickly off-set by the speed in which ScriptPNG operates. I estimate that it took less than half the time to process those 20 .png images compared to PNGSlim, and the resulting output was nearly the same.
16 of those 20 images were within 0.5% of the optimized size of the PNGSlim output. Two of the 20 images were about 2-3% larger than the optimized size of my PNGSlim files, while the remaining two files were less than 1% smaller than the previous “smallest size” I had been able to achieve using the PNGSlim too.
It’s too early for me know what all of this means as of yet! However, the performance of ScriptPNG was strong and fast enough that I wanted to make sure and share a bit of information to encourage others out there to give it a try as well! Looks very promising…and if they can get those optimized results on-par with (or superior to) PNGSlim, we might just have a new favorite tool to play with when it comes to .png optimization!
