JASC Palette are UTF-8 instead ASCII + PSPPALETTE extension missing

[j2j]

Hello,

I use Cyotek Color Palette Editor version 1.6.0.258 to create JASC
Palette. The examples are described by trid
(http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html) as "Text - UTF-8 encoded" (see appended
utf8/output/trid-old.txt) and by file(1) command as "UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM)
text" (see appended utf8/output/file-5.32.txt)

After some inspection i found that these examples have three additional
bytes 0xEF,0xBB,0xBF at the beginning, which is the UTF-8 representation of
the BOM ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark ).

There does not exist an official documentation for such color palettes. Most
matching documentation found was at cryer web site:
   http://www.cryer.co.uk/file-types/p/pal.htm

Examples created and accepted by Xnview version 2.40 are ASCII files which
start with string JASC-PAL. I also found the same palette file format as
example "Safety.pal" in "Paint Shop Pro 5.01" dated 1998 and as
"Safety.PspPalette"/"Sicherheit.PspPalette" in latest "Paint Shop Pro 2018"
version. Because file format is so old and just contains ASCII digit i come
to conclusion that UTF-8 variant created by Cyotek Color Palette Editor is
wrong and ASCII variant is the right way.

Furthermore Cyotek software use only "pal" file name extension for such
palettes.  Besides file name extension "pal" i also found examples with
"psppalette" extension.  When looking at
http://extension.nirsoft.net/PspPalette we see "PspPalette" is registered as
"PaintShopPro8.Palette" and higher numbers. So it seems that "pal" is used
by older Paint Shop Pro versions when product of Jasc Software ( see URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaintShop_Pro and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasc_Software ) and in newer versions probably
8 longer "PspPalette" extension is used.

So Cyotek software should also read and probably write palettes with
"PspPalette" extension.

Used OS is Windows version 10.0.14393 inside Virtualbox 5.1.28r117968.

Some examples and output are stored in archive pal_utf8.zip.
I hope that these minor bugs can be fixed.

With best wishes
Jörg Jenderek

[Richard Moss]

Hello,

Thank you very much for this bug report. I checked the source and can confirm that it is definitely set up to write a BOM and is therefore definitely very wrong! Silly oversight in missing the PspPalette extension too.

I've logged these on our internal tracker and both of these will be addressed in the next update to the product.

Once again, many thanks for both finding these issues and taking the time to send us the detailed bug reports.

Regards;
Richard Moss

[Richard Moss]

Hello,

These two bugs have been fixed and can be found in version 1.6.1.265 or higher. There's currently a nightly build available with these fixes (and others). However, there's more fixes I want to do before I push a non-nightly version.

Regards;
Richard Moss