   What EXACTLY would you say does it take to...
  Hey, I've been looking around, and I started thinking, what EXACTLY does it take to basically invent your own file type besides..A way to view the content.A way to add content.A way to delete the content.A way to use the content to help you and/or other people.Is this basically what you need, or are there more things that I should know about? :P. (P.S: I hope you don't get mad at me for posting such a..useless post (since it obviously isn't a problem), but I am really curious about your opinion.)   
  That's all. You can write and read anything you want or need from a file, as long as you can translate it to some serial form. In many cases the last requirement is the only one you need to even impliment, because you can use a text editor to do the other 3.   ;  Writing down a specification for the format.   ;  See, I also noticed that some people like converting what they put into their own file to some foreign text of some sort (most likely ASCII, or hex, or something other then plain - text) just to keep people from being able to easily modify it.   ;  No; that's generally just how things happen to look when they are interpreted by a text editor (or word processor). All data is "binary data"; its appearance is dependant upon the interpretation imposed on that data. Even a hex/binary editor is imposing an interpretation.   ;  ASCII is plain text. ;)Any file format you encounter is just data stored in binary using some kind of specification. For instance, a basic image format would look like this...int XSize;int YSize;int *ImgData;1 int containing the width, 1 int containing the height (in pixels), then the rest is just image data (using integers to store image data is a bad idea if you're not gonna use all 32 bits, such as with 16bpp, but that's besides the point).Bam. New image format. You can do whatever you want with this now. :)   