>>>> "Ben" == Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com>
writes:
Ben> You mean GNU Emacs?
Ben> Do they handle translation of pbm or ppm internally, without
Ben> the need for external libraries? This would be ideal,
Ben> esp. if pbm/ppm are simple enough that a Lisp program can
Ben> generate a new one out of text (I think this is indeed the
Ben> case);
Yes, they do PBM internally, but it looks like they don't do PPM at
all. GNU's color icons are all in XPM. (They do duplicate the icons
used by tree-widget.el in PNG). I don't see that PBM is a huge win
over XBM, which I assume we already do internally for Windows.
I don't think there are any pixmap formats that are simple enough to
do internally (except maybe Windows BMP, which I know nothing about).
The problem is that there are just too many ways to tweak pixmap
representations, and people want the formats they use to handle
several varieties.
Ben> I really hate the idea of depending on external libraries for
Ben> necessary functionality.
I think that's awfully extreme. XPM has always been a hairy icky
thang epitomizing the whole X11 swamp, but libpng, netpbm, libjpeg,
and zlib are pretty bullet-proof and have been stable for years.
Ben> If all this is true, I'd suggest just copying the GNU code
Ben> and doing the same switch.
-0 (== I'm unfavorable and won't contribute effort, but won't veto.)
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