Famous riposte by John Nack of Adobe: <a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the_psd_format.html" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/05/some_thoughts_about_the...</a><p>One quote worth picking out: "Wouldn’t it be better if all apps could read/write just one common interchange format? That’s just what Adobe is developing with FXG." Come 2015, and FXG appears to be dead and buried.
Was PSD designed to be a portable format? My understanding is that it was only meant to be used directly by Adobe Photoshop, much like the original DOC was meant to be used only by Microsoft Word. As such, it's a little unfair to call it out as a bad format because it was never meant to be reverse engineered and reimplemented.
Looks like a typical rant from a junior developer. More experienced developers realize why decades-old file formats are they way they are and when needing to work with them, adapt themselves to it.
Mwahaha. Kiddie stuff. Go try and read RTF some time. Try to convert it to HTML. Try to figure out how to extract <i>tables</i>. Oh, bugger.<p>The best I can say about that experience is (a) I learned a lot about how legacy file formats grow, especially when they are supposed to be "open" but are really treated as proprietary ground for developers to stomp all over in metal-soled booties, and (b) the company that paid me to do that work is long, long out of business. The misery is long past.
Meh. It's old and complicated.<p>I wrote a PSD dumper in 2013 so our artists could use Photoshop as a level editor. Interestingly, the Photoshop Javascript automation engine is so slow, that it was faster to parse the file in Python. Like a minutes-long export using Javascript in Photoshop took a second or so when dumping with Python for a file with 100 layers.
The code (and comment) is five years old. Any updates on how the PSD format has changed (if at all) since then?<p>Also, the title used here isn't actually a quote from the link. I'd opt for the closing sentence "PSD is not my favourite file format" instead ...
Is it anything like Microsoft Word where the PSD file is basically a dump of what Photoshop uses to represent the document in RAM? Could cause for some interesting differences between files created on a Macintosh vs Windows.
Is this problem being solved the best way? Is it not possible to build a plugin for Photoshop that exports an interim format, something where there are things like layers with text elements in something CSS friendly so that those people with familiarity with things like imagemagick can automate what they need doing in some sensible way? This need be a one-way export so those of us that have to do something with other people's Photoshop files can just get on with it. The import of the interim format (to Photoshop) need not be necessary for many workflows.
> Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that <i>these</i> particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should <i>not</i> be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size.<p>This sounds like a spec that grew organically, with multiple people contributing to it over the years; the alignment might've come from PowerPC/68k-based Macs, as also evidenced by the use of big-endianness throughout.
“Most are the gradual result of discovering better ways to do things over 20 years, while staying compatible with older applications.” (PSD apologist Tim Wright)<p>There is no force more destructive.