The Complete File Format Guide
Everything you ever wanted to know about the files you use every day. Technical specifications, history, and common use cases.
Portable Document Format
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it.
JPEG Image
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality.
Portable Network Graphics
Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
JavaScript Object Notation
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999.
Comma-Separated Values
A Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas.
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
Plain Text File
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system.
Microsoft Word Document
DOCX is the default file format for Microsoft Word 2007 and newer. It is an open format based on XML, unlike the older proprietary binary .doc format.
Graphics Interchange Format
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmap image format that supports animations. It uses LZW compression to reduce file size without degrading quality for images with solid colors.
Web Picture Format
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
MPEG-1 Audio Layer III
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio that uses a form of lossy data compression. It allows for major reductions in file size compared to uncompressed audio while sounding like a faithful reproduction to most listeners.
MPEG-4 Part 14
MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also store other data such as subtitles and still images.
ZIP Archive
ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed.
HyperText Markup Language
HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML.
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