The PNG Guide is an eBook based on Greg Roelofs' book, originally published by O'Reilly.



Suggested Palette (sPLT)

  • Status:   PNG Specification
  • Location:   before first IDAT
  • Multiple:   yes

The suggested-palette chunk, sPLT, grew out of an acknowledgment of some limitations in PNG's PLTE, tRNS, and hIST chunks. I have already noted that PLTE is allowed only in palette, RGB, and RGBA images and that hIST is allowed only in images with PLTE; I also noted that tRNS is disallowed in images with alpha channels, which rules out the use of PLTE plus tRNS as a suggested gray/alpha or RGBA palette. sPLT eliminates these restrictions by merging all three of the older chunks into a general-purpose, suggested-RGBA-palette-plus-histogram chunk. In addition, sPLT may contain any number of entries (as long as it doesn't exceed the maximum chunk-size limit of two gigabytes); its entries may have either 8-bit or 16-bit sample depths; and multiple sPLT chunks encoding different suggested quantizations are allowed. A palette-based image may even have an sPLT chunk, perhaps representing a reduced palette for a particular web browser. The format of sPLT, given in Table 11-3, is straightforward.

Table 11-3. sPLT Chunk

Field Length and Valid Range
Palette name 1-79 bytes (Latin-1 text)
Null separator 1 byte
Sample depth 1 byte (8 or 16)
Red value #1 1 byte (0-255) or 2 bytes (0-65,535)
Green value #1 1 byte (0-255) or 2 bytes (0-65,535)
Blue value #1 1 byte (0-255) or 2 bytes (0-65,535)
Alpha value #1 1 byte (0-255) or 2 bytes (0-65,535)
Relative frequency #1 2 bytes (0-65,535)
... ...

The number of sPLT entries is implicitly given by the size of the chunk and the sample depth; in the more common case of 8-bit samples, it is obtained by dividing the chunk size, less the length of the palette name and the two subsequent bytes, by six. Entries are required to appear in decreasing order of frequency, but there is no requirement that all of them be different nor that all of them be used by the image. Furthermore, opaque images may include nonopaque sPLT entries, grayscale images may include colored entries, and the sample depth of sPLT is independent of that of the image.

Unlike the suggested practice for PLTE in RGBA images, the red, green, and blue values in sPLT are neither premultiplied by the alpha values nor precomposited against a background color. An encoder would still have to inspect every pixel if it wanted to compute an optimal palette for display of an RGBA image against a patterned background, but sPLT would enable a statistical approach based on the background image's own histogram in that case. And for solid backgrounds, sPLT provides the means to build an optimal palette regardless of the choice of background color.

As with the hIST chunk, frequency values are scaled to the range 0-65,535 and therefore are likely to be approximate. Inflating ``important'' colors based on the image's subject matter is allowed in sPLT, too. But whereas hIST requires a 0 frequency to correspond exactly to 0 pixels, sPLT allows the 0 value to represent infrequently used or unimportant colors. If all of the frequency values are 0, however, the histogram is undefined.

Note that multiple sPLT chunks are required to have different palette names.




Last Update: 2010-Nov-26