Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale
From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Is The Screen Color?
Message-ID: <823@boing.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 89 15:37:35 GMT
References: <18700@paris.ics.uci.edu> <8906261440.AA13062@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca.
Lines: 32

In article converse@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Donna Converse) writes:
>
>> someone asked about how to determine if the screen was
>> color or black and white.  I found this in a book I have by O'Reilly and
>> Associates.
>
>> depth = DisplayPlanes( display, screen );
>
>Agh!  We just answered this a hundred questions ago! :-)
>
>
>Testing if the display has more than 1 plane only tells you if the 
>hardware of the display is capable of displaying more than just black and
>white.

Nor can you assume that black and white are displayed in a 1 bitplane
visual. It appears that the default servers preallocate or assign
black and white colors when it starts up. Since black and white seem
to have become synonomous with 0 and 1 (or 1 and 0) we have had to add
some command line arguments to redefine what white and black are,
faking the rest of the X server and clients out.

This could not be done in the rgb database either since some applications
seem to request colors via hardcoded numbers, even black and white
causing them to fail if I've told the system that black is really a
brown and white is a yellowish color.



-- 
Dale Luck     GfxBase/Boing, Inc.
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