MAG (GIF archiver)

File Format
Name	MAG (GIF archiver)
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Graphics MAG (GIF archiver)
Extension(s)	.mag, .gif
Released	1996

MAG (Mark Archiver for GIF) is a compression/archiving utility, featuring a special way to compress GIF image files that usually improves the compression ratio. It was developed by Mark Gauthier, and distributed as shareware.

Discussion

A .MAG archive uses standard ZIP format, except that any GIF files contained in it require special processing to decompress. After decompression, a GIF file will be functionally equivalent to the original, but not necessarily byte-for-byte identical.

If a GIF file is extracted from a .MAG archive by a standard unzip utility, the result will be a ".GIF" file that's not in GIF format. Instead, it will be in a non-compressed image format we might call "MAG intermediate format".

Identification

There's probably no simple way to distinguish a .MAG file from a standard ZIP file, just by its contents.

The intermediate files made by MAG v0.1 are observed to start with ASCII "MAG000".

Software

• MAG v0.1 (DOS software)