Resources & Documentation

Lossless raster image with full alpha transparency. Best for screenshots, logos and any graphic that needs a transparent background.

Lossy compressed photo format. Smallest size for photographs and complex images where a tiny quality drop is acceptable.

Modern Google image format with both lossy and lossless modes — typically 25-35% smaller than PNG/JPG at the same quality.

Animated raster format limited to 256 colors. Use for short loops and pixel art; for high-quality animation prefer WebP or MP4.

Uncompressed Windows bitmap. Legacy format with huge file sizes but universal compatibility on Windows.

XML-based vector format. Scales infinitely without quality loss — ideal for logos, icons and illustrations.

Lossless raster with optional compression and multi-page support. Standard in print, scanning and archival.

Windows icon container that packs multiple resolutions in one file. Used for browser favicons and app icons.

H.264/H.265 video in an MPEG-4 container. Universal compatibility and the best balance of quality, size and playback support.

Open-source VP8/VP9 video with native HTML5 playback. Often smaller than MP4 at the same quality, ideal for the web.

Microsoft container from the 90s. Widely supported but produces large files because compression is usually light.

Apple QuickTime container — the default output from Macs and iPhones. Internally similar to MP4.

Open Matroska container that supports multiple audio and subtitle tracks. Common for high-quality movies.

Adobe Flash Video — mostly legacy; you'll find it in older video archives and streams.

Windows Media Video — Microsoft's legacy format from the XP era, still common in corporate Windows workflows.

Lossy compression with universal compatibility. Still the de-facto distribution format for music.

Uncompressed PCM audio — pristine quality at the cost of file size. The format used in production and editing.

Lossless compression that's roughly half the size of WAV with bit-perfect quality. Audiophile choice.

Lossy successor to MP3 with better quality at the same bitrate. Default for iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube.

Open-source Vorbis or Opus audio. Comparable to MP3/AAC at smaller sizes, popular in games and web.

AAC audio inside an MPEG-4 container. Apple's preferred audio format.

Modern open codec with the best quality at low bitrates. Used by WebRTC, Discord, Telegram and YouTube.

Portable Document Format — preserves exact layout, fonts and graphics across any platform. The universal printable document.

Microsoft Word document (Office Open XML). The standard for editable text documents.

Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The standard for tabular data, formulas and charts.

Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. The standard for slide decks.

Plain text — no formatting, no metadata. The simplest and most universal document format.

Rich Text Format — Microsoft's older cross-application formatted text. Pre-dates DOCX but still widely supported.

OpenDocument Text — open standard for word processing, native format of LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

The most common archive format. Supports compression, folder structure and encryption with cross-platform support everywhere.

Proprietary format from RARLab with strong compression. Read on any platform but creation requires the licensed RAR tool — we extract only.

Open-source format with the highest compression ratios — typically 30-70% smaller than ZIP. Native to 7-Zip.

Unix tape archive — bundles files together without compression. Usually paired with gzip as .tar.gz.

Single-file compression based on DEFLATE. Most common as part of .tar.gz tarballs.

JavaScript Object Notation — the dominant data-interchange format for web APIs. Hierarchical, human-readable.

Extensible Markup Language — verbose but flexible. Backbone of legacy enterprise systems and document formats.

Comma-Separated Values — the simplest tabular format. Opens in any spreadsheet and is trivially parseable.

Human-friendly data serialization. The go-to format for config files in Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and Ansible.