🚀 go-pugleaf

Since this is rapidly becoming a FAQable question, I figure I'll go ahead and
take up the net bandwidth.

In Computer Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH pub?), Volume 25, Number 2 (April 1991)
was a good article by Wayne Carlson (waynec@cis.ohio-state.edu) called "A
Survey of Computer Graphics Image Encoding and Storage Formats".  It is a 
good intro to image compression and described Huffman codes; Lempel, Ziv
and Welch (LZW) adaptive compression; and Run-Length encoding; and other
approaches, as well as the formats of Utah RLE, TIFF, PICT version2, IFF,
GIF, TGA, Sun Rasterfile, GKS/CGI, and CCITT Fax.  It also has a ton of
references to more detailed papers on those formats.

My 2 cents- when appropriate, let's try to use TIFF as a de facto standard-
while it does have its drawbacks, it's more general and prolific than the
other formats, supports lossless compression, and good public domain code 
exists for it (anon ftp to ucbvax.berkeley.edu:~ftp/pub/tiff)...

						kevin