If you are involved in designing or handling printed circuit boards (PCBs), you probably come across the Gerber format frequently. Currently used as an actual standard in the PCB industry, the GBR extension is attached to files that contain images and descriptions of various board data, including layers, solder masks, electrical connections, drilling data etc.
While most people describe SVG as a vector format containing vectors, animations or interactive graphics and supported by the largest part of web browsers, few know that SVGs can also store raster images. And the best part is that these raster images can handle alpha-channel and JPEG compression, which makes SVG a great alternative for the larger-sized PNG.
SVG is also a better alternative than WebP, JPEG2000 or JPEG-XR when it comes to web programming, as it is supported by Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 9+ and Firefox — thus covering all major browsers.
The SWF format is one that you’ll find commonly used for browser games, vector animations and other types of multimedia that imply video, sound and/or user interaction. Initially developed by Macromedia, SWFs are currently Adobe Flash files and their name is an acronym for ShockWave Flash or Small Web File.
SWF files can contain a collection of images, including both vectors and bitmaps, as well as ActionScript content — a scripting language that facilitates user interaction. A SWF file can contain from few images to more than a hundred pictures with text, animation, and scripts in various combinations. For example, one page with text and several raster images inside it. Extracting all raster images by converting a SWF file to one or more image files can be a tricky operation and requires using a software program that can process multi-page image files, such as reaConverter.