Hi,
please enjoy a rant from the comments of the Xee source[1], a
MacOS X image viewer written by a spiritual (if not actual)
member of this not-a-mailing-list, Dag Ågren:
At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you
about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is
not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to
other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal
format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my
hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the
fierce passion of a million suns.
If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will
do both, in different places. It will then make up three more
ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD
makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it
suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be
aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not*
be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are
either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in
the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of
these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would
pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.
Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find
something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died
in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That
last detail may not be important for the purposes of the
simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time
imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this
Rube Goldberg of a file format.
Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the
PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for
permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me
this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy
of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can
only imagine that they make this process so difficult because
they are intensely ashamed of having created this
abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go
through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would
have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them
all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every
single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship
directly into the sun.
PSD is not my favourite file format.
[1]:
http://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/trunk/XeePhotoshopLoader.m?spec=svn28&r=11#107
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
