Free file format

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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]}

1 Archiving and compression
2 Multimedia
3 Text
4 Other
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

Archiving and compression

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

Multimedia

CMML — Timed metadata and subtitles.
DAISY Digital Talking Book — A talking book format.
FLAC — Lossless audio codec.
Matroska — A container format.
MNG — moving pictures, based on PNG.
Musepack — An audio codec.
Ogg — A container format.
Portable Network Graphics — lossless compressed format.^[2]
Scalable Vector Graphics — vector graphics.^[3]
SMIL — A media playlisting format and multimedia integration language^[4]^[5]
Speex — Speech codec.
WavPack — An audio codec.
XSPF — A playlist format for multimedia.

Text

ASCII — a plain text file.
DVI — device independent (TeX).
HTML/XHTML — markup language for web pages.
LaTeX — document markup language.
Office Open XML — a formatted text format (ISO/IEC 29500:2008).^[6]
OpenDocument v1.0 — a formatted text format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006).^[7]
PostScript — a page description language and programming language.
Rich Text Format — a formatted text format.
Unicode
UTF-8 — text encoding with support for all common languages and scripts.

Other

CSV — comma separated values, commonly used for spreadsheets or simple databases.
YAML — human readable data serialization format.
- json — object notation, subset of ECMAScript.
XML — a general-purpose markup language.^[8]
- RSS — syndication.
CSS — style sheet format usually used with (X)HTML.
DjVu — file format 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 format.
MD5, SHA1, CRC32, other hashes and checksums.
TrueCrypt — container for encrypted data.
WebDav — internet filesystem format.
- iCalendar — Calander data format.