Re: Scroll bars.

[raster redhat com]

On 27 Jan, Urmane Hendrake shouted:
->  > On 26 Jan, Shawn T. Amundson shouted:
->  > ->  On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 raster@redhat.com wrote:
->  [much snipped]
->  > Well the more images/pixmaps the theme uses, the more memory - but that
->  > is a user choice, so that cannot be gotten around.
->  
->  That brings up a good question I've had for a while: for the size of the
->  files we're using here (ie I'm guessing they'll be on the order of the
->  window decorations for E), what's the preferred file format?  I'm familiar
->  with most of them, but not how they compare against each other.  I know
->  that jpg is lossy, gif is <256 colors, and png was supposed to be The
->  Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread(tm) (including alpha channels, which
->  the Xserver doesn't support), but which of the many is the best for gnome?

I don't see that there should be a single standard. Imlib can handle all
those formats one way or another.

here are my personal views:

JPEG is great for large background images - it compreses very well and
the loss is quite tolerable - it's NOT a good format for "shaped"
images.

GIF is bad. It's proprietary and limited to 256 colors max.

PNG is god - it does compression, alpha and any number of colours
without los.

PPM is good - mainly because the code to read it in is 1 line of C code
- without libraries. PPM headers are:
P6
# coments 
width height
max_value
datadatddatd

width and height are integers in pixels,
max_value is nearly always 255, but can be changed.
data is binary data in bytes RGBRGBRGBRGB

To write and read ppm is simple - and most every unix app can read ppm.

I'm not a proponent of any format in particular, but using one single
format is not a god idea. Different formats have different properties.
XPM is outdated and limited - if anything I'd sugest replacing XPM by
PNG. If minimalism were to stay I'd recoomend sticking to JPEG and PNG
- just keep two - JPEG for large images where a little los is
tolerable, and PNG for small icons where loss is undesireable.

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