interchange format

As can be seen from the name exchange format, it is a file format that can be exchanged between different operating systems and application programs. Simple exchange formats are characterized by the fact that they contain only the most necessary operating system- and application-specific formatting characters and control characters, since these characters are interpreted and displayed differently by other operating systems, other versions or other application programs.

Exchange formats exist for all media file formats: for text, graphics, images, audio, video, typesetting data, editing data, control data, etc. One of the best known exchange formats for texts is the ASCII character set. Such ASCII texts have no styling and formatting characters and can therefore be interpreted by other text programs. Other interchange formats support the interchange of text files such as the Rich Text Format( RFT), graphics files such as the Drawing Interchange Format ( DXF) and image files such as the Graphics Interchange Format ( GIF) and the Still Picture Interchange File Format ( SPIFF), or text and image files such as the Portable Document Format( PDF) or Postscript( PS) for typesetting files.

Document interchange formats include Open Document Interchange Format( ODIF) and Document Interchange Architecture (DIA). For data, there is the older Data Interchange Format( DIF) and Electronic Data Interchange( EDI), and files can be exchanged via the Interchange File Format( IFF). For multimedia, there is the Audio Interchange File Format( AIFF) for audio, the Sound Description Interchange Format( SDIF) for sound, the Material Exchange Format( MXF) for video, the Advanced Authoring Format ( AAF) for multimedia files, and the Open MediaFramework( OMF) for video editing data. Furthermore, there are various user-specific exchange formats.