I used to think this way too, but it uses up so much screen real estate. (And
all the xloads I have across the top of my screen are 50x50, so nyahh! :-).
Some problems with allowing arbitrary sized images are:
- they don't tesselate with each other.
- the images rapidly get too big to pump around as mail headers.
I fear the day when the headers outweigh the message text by orders
of magnitude.
Now one way of solving the size problem is to dither the image down to whatever
size is in use at display time, but for grainy images (i.e. 64x64) this
dithering is going to blur things a lot, and for non-grainy images (256x256
or whatever) the scaled down version may well lose important details, else
why was such resolution needed in the first place?
| I think a good approach might be to use the XPM3 format as the baseline, and
| find some way of compressing it efficiently. It's a very nice format, in
| that it allows you to efficiently tune your image for color, grayscale, and
| monochrome devices without duplicating data. Also there is a good library
| for managing color allocation, etc.
Where could one find the spec for this?
- Cameron Simpson
cameron@cse.unsw.edu.au, DoD#743
-- !Peeve: doing an ol' fashioned manual spell check, I find "Himalayan" defined in my Merriam-Webster New Kollegiate Diktionary only as "any of a breed of small white domesticated rabbit..." Huh? - David Farley, dgf1@midway.uchicago.edu