term% cat index.txt IMAGE(6) Games Manual IMAGE(6)
NAME
image - external format for images
SYNOPSIS
#include <draw.h>
DESCRIPTION
Images are described in graphics(2), and the definition of pixel values
is in color(6). Fonts and images are stored in external files in ma‐
chine-independent formats.
Image files are read and written using readimage and writeimage (see
allocimage(2)),or readmemimage and writememimage (see memdraw(2)). An
uncompressed image file starts with 5 strings: chan, r.min.x, r.min.y,
r.max.x, and r.max.y. Each is right-justified and blank padded in 11
characters, followed by a blank. The chan value is a textual string
describing the pixel format (see strtochan in graphics(2) and the dis‐
cussion of channel descriptors below), and the rectangle coordinates
are decimal strings. The rest of the file contains the r.max.y-r.min.y
rows of pixel data. A row consists of the byte containing pixel
r.min.x and all the bytes up to and including the byte containing pixel
r.max.x-1. For images with depth d less than eight, a pixel with x-co‐
ordinate = x will appear as d contiguous bits in a byte, with the
pixel's high order bit starting at the byte's bit number d*(x mod
(8/d)), where bits within a byte are numbered 0 to 7 from the high or‐
der to the low order bit. Rows contain integral number of bytes, so
there may be some unused pixels at either end of a row. If d is
greater than 8, the definition of images requires that it will a multi‐
ple of 8, so pixel values take up an integral number of bytes.
The loadimage and unloadimage functions described in allocimage(2) also
deal with rows in this format, stored in user memory.
The channel format string is a sequence of two-character channel de‐
scriptions, each comprising a letter (r for red, g for green, b for
blue, a for alpha, m for color-mapped, k for greyscale, and x for
``don't care'') followed by a number of bits per pixel. The sum of the
channel bits per pixel is the depth of the image, which must be either
a divisor or a multiple of eight. It is an error to have more than one
of any channel but x. An image must have either a greyscale channel; a
color mapped channel; or red, green, and blue channels. If the alpha
channel is present, it must be at least as deep as any other channel.
The channel string defines the format of the pixels in the file, and
should not be confused with ordering of bytes in the file. In particu‐
lar 'r8g8b8' pixels have byte ordering blue, green, and red within the
file. See color(6) for more details of the pixel format.
A venerable yet deprecated format replaces the channel string with a
decimal ldepth, which is the base two logarithm of the number of bits
per pixel in the image. In this case, ldepths 0, 1, 2, and 3 corre‐
spond to channel descriptors k1, k2, k4, and m8, respectively.
Compressed image files start with a line of text containing the word
compressed, followed by a header as described above, followed by the
image data. The data, when uncompressed, is laid out in the usual
form.
The data is represented by a string of compression blocks, each encod‐
ing a number of rows of the image's pixel data. Compression blocks are
at most 6024 bytes long, so that they fit comfortably in a single 9P
message. Since a compression block must encode a whole number of rows,
there is a limit (about 5825 bytes) to the width of images that may be
encoded. Most wide images are in subfonts, which, at 1 bit per pixel
(the usual case for fonts), can be 46600 pixels wide.
A compression block begins with two decimal strings of twelve bytes
each. The first number is one more than the y coordinate of the last
row in the block. The second is the number of bytes of compressed data
in the block, not including the two decimal strings. This number must
not be larger than 6000.
Pixels are encoded using a version of Lempel & Ziv's sliding window
scheme LZ77, best described in J A Storer & T G Szymanski `Data Com‐
pression via Textual Substitution', JACM 29#4, pp. 928-951.
The compression block is a string of variable-length code words encod‐
ing substrings of the pixel data. A code word either gives the sub‐
string directly or indicates that it is a copy of data occurring previ‐
ously in the pixel stream.
In a code word whose first byte has the high-order bit set, the rest of
the byte indicates the length of a substring encoded directly. Values
from 0 to 127 encode lengths from 1 to 128 bytes. Subsequent bytes are
the literal pixel data.
If the high-order bit is zero, the next 5 bits encode the length of a
substring copied from previous pixels. Values from 0 to 31 encode
lengths from 3 to 34 bytes. The bottom two bits of the first byte and
the 8 bits of the next byte encode an offset backward from the current
position in the pixel data at which the copy is to be found. Values
from 0 to 1023 encode offsets from 1 to 1024. The encoding may be
`prescient', with the length larger than the offset, which works just
fine: the new data is identical to the data at the given offset, even
though the two strings overlap.
Some small images, in particular 48×48 face files as used by seemail
(see faces(1) and face(6)) and 16×16 cursors, can be stored textually,
suitable for inclusion in C source. Each line of text represents one
scan line as a comma-separated sequence of hexadecimal bytes, shorts,
or words in C format. For cursors, each line defines a pair of bytes.
(It takes two images to define a cursor; each must be stored separately
to be processed by programs such as tweak(1).) Face files of one bit
per pixel are stored as a sequence of shorts, those of larger pixel
sizes as a sequence of longs. Software that reads these files must de‐
duce the image size from the input; there is no header. These formats
reflect history rather than design.
SEE ALSO
jpg(1), tweak(1), graphics(2), draw(2), allocimage(2), color(6),
face(6), font(6)
IMAGE(6)