Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!encore!bzs
From: bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: PAX Format Package
Message-ID: <4967@xenna.Encore.COM>
Date: 23 Feb 89 19:52:53 GMT
References: <133@mirsa.inria.fr>
Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA
Lines: 19
In-reply-to: daniel@mirsa.inria.fr's message of 22 Feb 89 15:02:22 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.15 of Tue Jun  9 1987 on xenna (berkeley-unix)


Good thing to bring up.

Although I see the desires of the design, which are good, it seems
like tying the colormap to, essentially, the ASCII printable character
set (probably less without contortions) is an artificial and probably
ultimately problematic limitation.

Personally I can't think of any easy way out of it other than using
some sort of numeric encoding (eg.  #C8 #04) of the colormap index
(perhaps a space can be used to separate if variable numbers of digits
are to be allowed rather than an additional escape char like "#".) I
*do* understand the original desire to use one char per pixel to
simplify editing/viewing, problem.

Any thoughts/reactions on this particular issue? I suspect the
designers agonized over it also.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||