Bitmap images

Andrew Burton wrote: I believe the backwards RGB quads* are just a hang-up from the fact that almost every platform which supported .bmp files used an Intel x86 (or compatible) CPU - and Intel's x86 processors store multi-byte values lowest-first. *Going from hazy memory, I seem to recall that colour map entries in .bmp files are four bytes: BGRx, with x being always set to zero. I can't remember if 24-bit direct-colour images also use four bytes per pixel or only three. No idea why the origin of the image was bottom-left rather than top-left, but there wasn't ever really a standard for this kind of thing (if MS Windows itself sets the origin at bottom-left then it certainly makes sense; .bmp was really only ever popular for MS-Windows, after all) As far as I know, no. Heh, the last time I wrote any .bmp handling code it was to do that the other way around, as I had a bunch of IFF files that I wanted to read on a Windows 3.1 box. , but would love to add Obvious question: why .bmp? As above, it was only ever popular with MS Windows; in the rest of the world TIFF, PCX, or Targa support tended to be a lot more prominent. PCX and Targa seem to have fallen by the wayside these days, but TIFF is still alive and well, and of course PNG has come on the scene. If I were writing something to export data to an image format these days, I'd pick TIFF or PNG over MS-bitmap; certainly writing a TIFF encoder isn't too complex (writing a comprehensive decoder can get a little hairy due to all the vendor extensions, but writing something to handle the typical flavours isn't hard), and from what I hear PNG isn't too difficult to handle either. cheers Jules