Every graphics API and project has its own way of describing and naming pixel formats — the different flavors used by Vulkan, OpenGL, Mesa, Gallium, Wayland, DRM, GBM, Pixman, Mir and SDL are just a few of the beasts one can encounter in the graphics wilderness. The Pixel Format Guide aims to become a comprehensive reference for pixel format definitions used by such APIs and projects, describing aspects as component bit order and dependence on system endianness. The guide provides both a collection of documents describing how to interpret the definitions, and a python tool and library (called pfg) that allows automatic interpretation of pixel format definitions and operations on them. The Pixel Format Guide currently supports 12 pixel format families for a total of 541 format definitions.

The pfg python library allows users to leverage all the information and capabilities of the tool to create their own custom scripts. A prime example of such a script would be the automatic production of code to convert between pixel formats definitions belonging to different format families.