Re: Color Palette

Scott Raney ((no email))
Tue, 29 Mar 94 10:02:20 MST

>
> I have developed an application that is quite large and works just fine
> for me. I have several hundred images that I have imported. All of the
> images are .pnm format.
>
> The problem I have, is when I move it to another system. On the
> production/real system (not my development system) the colors are changed.
> They, the SysAds on the real system, mentioned that they had altered the
> color map for their applications.
>
> My question is, how can I preserve the colors from my development machine
> so that the images will look the same on the other systems regardless of
> what they have done to the color map? Is there anything I can do to
> ensure that the palette/color map I use will be maintained when I take it
> to a different machine?

Sounds to me like pretty deep kim-chee. You can let MetaCard take
over the colormap (set the property "privateColors" to true), but this
will cause the screen to "go technicolor" every time you change the
focused window. Give this a try, but don't be surprised if the other
applications looks pretty bad when MetaCard has the focus.

The best solution is to have the other application not be so greedy.
Tell them to take 128 colors and leave the rest alone. Then use
ppmquant (or another utility) to reduce the number of colors your
images use.

Second best would be to have them define a standard (and static)
colormap which you would process all your images to use (MetaCard does
remapping automatically, but just does closest-match substitution.
There are image processing applications that will do dithering which
looks much better). In either case, you'll probably have to reimport
all your images :-(
Scott

> Brad
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> | Bradford Marx | D.A.M. -- Mothers Against Dyslexia |
> | marxb@bah.com | Support your local chapter! |
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
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* Scott Raney  303-447-3936            Remember: the better you look, *
* raney@metacard.com                   the more you'll see -- Lidia   *
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