Subject: Re: Fori's Power Texture plugin??
From: Ernie Wright <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 22:29:24 -0700

Gord Davison wrote:

> [...] BMP *is* Windows standard. That means -- potentially -- we will
> be seeing _much_ more of it in future in the Intel neighbourhood as
> new apps struggle for "Win-Compliance". And, as far as general purpose
> graphic formats go, [IMO] BMP stinks. BMP has all the sophistication
> of a screen dump.

It's just another uncompressed format.  Keep in mind that the PC has a
great deal of pre-Windows history, and this has always mitigated against
a single format becoming as central as PICT or IFF on their respective
systems.  The Windows Paint accessory supports PCX, and most respectable
graphics programs typically support a half dozen other formats, e.g. TIFF
and TGA.  (It was sufficient for LW to support only IFF and TGA on the
Amiga, not so on the PC.)

> In one of my "Programming Windows" books, it says that the RLE option
> for BMPs is rarely used because the file size is often *larger* then
> the uncompressed BMP: now that's what I call compression!

As is typical of most such books, this is about half right.  Every RLE
scheme will increase file size in the worst case, including IFF and PCX.
For 256-color images, BMP is about average in this respect, while IFF is
pretty good and PCX can be really bad.

It's true that BMP is worse than average in 24-bit, but uncompressed has
always been the norm for BMPs at all color depths.  Compressed BMP, for
whatever reason, just never caught on.

> BTW, it's rumoured that JPEG [the "Group" that is] may be adopting a
> fractal compression format in future. The benefits are: _extremely_
> small file sizes [an order of magnitude higher than JPEG], lossless
> compression, and resolution-independence [because the graphic will be
> encoded into a fractal formula]. 

This sounds like Barnsley's IFS (iterated function system) compression.
If so, it's lossy, and it's covered by patents.

- Ernie