References for Chapter 3

Books

• Nigel Chapman and Jenny Chapman, Digital Media Tools (John Wiley & Sons: 3rd ed., 2007)

  A practical introduction to some of the most commonly used tools for multimedia production. This edition covers the CS3 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver. (Note that we do not describe Flash ActionScript in this book.)

• James D. Murray and William vanRyper, Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (O'Reilly: 2nd ed., 1996)

  The bulk of this book comprises descriptions of the internal layout of nearly 100 graphics file formats, including those commonly encountered in multimedia (GIF, JFIF, PNG, etc.). As such, it will only be of interest to programmers. The introductory chapters provide a useful review of some aspects of computer graphics and a general description of how the necessary information can be stored in a file. Extensive pointers to defining documents, standards, and so on are included.

• James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner and John F. Hughes, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley: 1995)

  This well-established academic text contains a thorough account of the theory of computer graphics, although some of the material is becoming out of date. It concentrates largely on vector graphics, and includes an extensive account of all aspects of 3-D graphics. The authors’ approach is mainly mathematical, and many readers will find it dry. Available in Pascal and C editions. A 3rd edition, in C# (!), is advertised as being available in 2009.

Web Pages

• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

  The main page of the W3C’s SVG section, includes links to all the SVG standards, as well as news about SVG and software that supports it.

• PDF reference

  PDF is now an ISO standard, and the actual standard is only available from ISO, who charge for it. However, Adobe have produced a document that is identical in content, which you can get for free from this page. They also intend to produce supplements describing changes as new versions of the format are introduced. The PDF reference was published in book form in 1993 by Addison-Wesley as “Portable Document Format Reference Manual”, but the format is extended with each release of Acrobat, so it is probably better to refer to the Web version.