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A free file format is a file format whose full specification is freely available and for which there are no restrictions (e.g. legal or technical) on its use.^[1] Users may design and use variations that suit their needs, and contribute enhancements for potential incorporation into the next official version of the format.^{citation needed}

Free file formats are good for interoperability and to prevent vendor lock-in.^{citation needed} It is a cornerstone in open systems.^{citation needed}

Archiving and compression

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• 7z — for both archiving and compression.
• SQX — for both archiving and compression.
• PAQ — for compression.
• bzip2 — for compression.
• gzip — for compression.
• tar — for archiving.
• ZIP — for both archiving and compression.

Multimedia

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• PNG — lossless compressed format.^[2]
• MNG — moving pictures, based on PNG.
• SVG — vector graphics.^[3]
• Ogg (A container format).
  • Vorbis — An audio codec.
    • The Vorbis format was developed specifically to compete with the widely used, but patented MP3 audio compression format.
  • Theora — A video codec.
  • FLAC — Lossless audio codec.
  • Speex — Speech codec.
  • CMML — Timed metadata and subtitles.
• Matroska — (A container format).
• Musepack — An audio codec.
• WavPack — An audio codec.
• SMIL — A media playlisting format and multimedia integration language.^[4][5]
• XSPF — A playlist format for multimedia.

Text

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• DVI — device independent (TeX).
• HTML/XHTML — markup language for web pages.
• LaTeX — document markup language.
• Office Open XML — a formatted text format (Ecma-376).^[6]
• OpenDocument v1.0 — a formatted text format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006).^[7]
• PostScript — a page description language and programming language.
• RTF — a formatted text format.
• TXT — a plain text file.

Other

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• CSV — spreadsheet file formats.
• CSS — style sheet format.
• DjVu — for scanned images.
• EAS3 — binary file format for floating point data
• ELF — Executable and Linkable Format.
• Hierarchical Data Format — Multi-platform data format for storing multidimensional arrays, among other data structures.
• NZB — for multipart binary files on Usenet.
• NetCDF — for scientific data.
• SDXF — the Structured Data eXchange Format.
• SFV — checksum.
• XML — a general-purpose markup language.^[8]
  • RSS — syndication.
• YAML — human readable data serialization format.

See also

Free software portal

• Open format
• Open standard
• Free software
• Open source
• Open source codecs and containers
• Free protocol

References

External links

• Free File Format Definition
• Definition of Free Cultural Works

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