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<tr><td width=20><td><b>IMAGE(7)</b><td align=right><b>IMAGE(7)</b>
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    <br>
<p><font size=+1><b>NAME     </b></font><br>

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    image &ndash; external format for images<br>
    
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<p><font size=+1><b>SYNOPSIS     </b></font><br>

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    <tt><font size=+1>#include &lt;draw.h&gt;<br>
    </font></tt>
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<p><font size=+1><b>DESCRIPTION     </b></font><br>

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    Images are described in <a href="../man3/graphics.html"><i>graphics</i>(3)</a>, and the definition of pixel
    values is in <a href="../man7/color.html"><i>color</i>(7)</a>. Fonts and images are stored in external
    files in machine-independent formats. 
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    Image files are read and written using <tt><font size=+1>readimage</font></tt> and <tt><font size=+1>writeimage</font></tt>
    (see <a href="../man3/allocimage.html"><i>allocimage</i>(3)</a>),<i>or</i> <tt><font size=+1>readmemimage</font></tt> and <tt><font size=+1>writememimage</font></tt> (see <a href="../man3/memdraw.html"><i>memdraw</i>(3)</a>).
    An uncompressed image file starts with 5 strings: <tt><font size=+1>chan</font></tt>, <tt><font size=+1>r.min.x</font></tt>,
    <tt><font size=+1>r.min.y</font></tt>, <tt><font size=+1>r.max.x</font></tt>, and <tt><font size=+1>r.max.y</font></tt>. Each is right-justified and blank
    padded in 11
    characters, followed by a blank. The <tt><font size=+1>chan</font></tt> value is a textual string
    describing the pixel format (see <tt><font size=+1>strtochan</font></tt> in <a href="../man3/graphics.html"><i>graphics</i>(3)</a> and
    the discussion of channel descriptors below), and the rectangle
    coordinates are decimal strings. The rest of the file contains
    the <tt><font size=+1>r.max.y&#8722;r.min.y</font></tt> rows of pixel data. A <i>row</i> consists
    of the byte containing pixel <tt><font size=+1>r.min.x</font></tt> and all the bytes up to and
    including the byte containing pixel <tt><font size=+1>r.max.x</font></tt>-1. For images with
    depth <i>d</i> less than eight, a pixel with x-coordinate = <i>x</i> will appear
    as <i>d</i> contiguous bits in a byte, with the pixel&#8217;s high order bit
    starting at the byte&#8217;s bit number <i>w</i>&#215;(<i>x</i> mod (8/<i>w</i>)), where
    bits within a byte are numbered 0 to 7 from the high order to
    the low order bit. Rows contain integral number of bytes, so there
    may be some unused pixels at either end of a row. If <i>d</i> is greater
    than 8, the definition of images requires that it will a multiple
    of 8, so pixel values take up an integral number of bytes. 
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    The <tt><font size=+1>loadimage</font></tt> and <tt><font size=+1>unloadimage</font></tt> functions described in <a href="../man3/allocimage.html"><i>allocimage</i>(3)</a>
    also deal with rows in this format, stored in user memory. 
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    The channel format string is a sequence of two-character channel
    descriptions, each comprising a letter (<tt><font size=+1>r</font></tt> for red, <tt><font size=+1>g</font></tt> for green,
    <tt><font size=+1>b</font></tt> for blue, <tt><font size=+1>a</font></tt> for alpha, <tt><font size=+1>m</font></tt> for color-mapped, <tt><font size=+1>k</font></tt> for greyscale,
    and <tt><font size=+1>x</font></tt> for &#8220;don&#8217;t care&#8221;) followed by a number of bits per pixel.
    The sum of the channel bits per pixel is the depth of the image,
    which must be either a divisor or a multiple of eight. It is an
    error to have more than one of any channel but <tt><font size=+1>x</font></tt>. An image must
    have either a greyscale channel; a color mapped channel; or red,
    green, and blue channels. If the alpha channel is present, it
    must be at least as deep as any other channel. 
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    The channel string defines the format of the pixels in the file,
    and should not be confused with ordering of bytes in the file.
    In particular <tt><font size=+1>'r8g8b8'</font></tt> pixels have byte ordering blue, green,
    and red within the file. See <a href="../man7/color.html"><i>color</i>(7)</a> for more details of the
    pixel format. 
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    A venerable yet deprecated format replaces the channel string
    with a decimal <i>ldepth</i>, which is the base two logarithm of the
    number of bits per pixel in the image. In this case, <i>ldepth</i>s 0,
    1, 2, and 3 correspond to channel descriptors <tt><font size=+1>k1</font></tt>, <tt><font size=+1>k2</font></tt>, <tt><font size=+1>k4</font></tt>, and
    <tt><font size=+1>m8</font></tt>, respectively. 
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    Compressed image files start with a line of text containing the
    word <tt><font size=+1>compressed</font></tt>, followed by a header as described above, followed
    by the image data. The data, when uncompressed, is laid out in
    the usual form. 
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    The data is represented by a string of compression blocks, each
    encoding a number of rows of the image&#8217;s pixel data. Compression
    blocks are at most 6024 bytes long, so that they fit comfortably
    in a single 9P message. Since a compression block must encode
    a whole number of rows, there is a limit (about 5825
    bytes) to the width of images that may be encoded. Most wide images
    are in subfonts, which, at 1 bit per pixel (the usual case for
    fonts), can be 46600 pixels wide. 
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    A compression block begins with two decimal strings of twelve
    bytes each. The first number is one more than the <tt><font size=+1>y</font></tt> coordinate
    of the last row in the block. The second is the number of bytes
    of compressed data in the block, not including the two decimal
    strings. This number must not be larger than 6000. 
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    Pixels are encoded using a version of Lempel &amp; Ziv&#8217;s sliding window
    scheme LZ77, best described in J A Storer &amp; T G Szymanski &#8216;Data
    Compression via Textual Substitution&#8217;, JACM 29#4, pp. 928-951.
    
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    The compression block is a string of variable-length code words
    encoding substrings of the pixel data. A code word either gives
    the substring directly or indicates that it is a copy of data
    occurring previously in the pixel stream. 
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    In a code word whose first byte has the high-order bit set, the
    rest of the byte indicates the length of a substring encoded directly.
    Values from 0 to 127 encode lengths from 1 to 128 bytes. Subsequent
    bytes are the literal pixel data. 
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    If the high-order bit is zero, the next 5 bits encode the length
    of a substring copied from previous pixels. Values from 0 to 31
    encode lengths from 3 to 34 bytes. The bottom two bits of the
    first byte and the 8 bits of the next byte encode an offset backward
    from the current position in the pixel data at which the copy
    is to be found. Values from 0 to 1023 encode offsets from 1 to
    1024. The encoding may be &#8216;prescient&#8217;, with the length larger
    than the offset, which works just fine: the new data is identical
    to the data at the given offset, even though the two strings overlap.
    
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    Some small images, in particular 48&#215;48 face files as used by <i>seemail</i>
    (see Plan 9&#8217;s <i>faces</i>(1) and <a href="../man7/face.html"><i>face</i>(7)</a>) and 16&#215;16 cursors, can be stored
    textually, suitable for inclusion in C source. Each line of text
    represents one scan line as a comma-separated sequence of hexadecimal
    bytes, shorts, or words in C format. For
    cursors, each line defines a pair of bytes. (It takes two images
    to define a cursor; each must be stored separately to be processed
    by programs such as <a href="../man1/tweak.html"><i>tweak</i>(1)</a>.) Face files of one bit per pixel
    are stored as a sequence of shorts, those of larger pixel sizes
    as a sequence of longs. Software that reads these files must
    deduce the image size from the input; there is no header. These
    formats reflect history rather than design.<br>
    
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<p><font size=+1><b>SEE ALSO     </b></font><br>

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    <a href="../man1/jpg.html"><i>jpg</i>(1)</a>, <a href="../man1/tweak.html"><i>tweak</i>(1)</a>, <a href="../man3/graphics.html"><i>graphics</i>(3)</a>, <a href="../man3/draw.html"><i>draw</i>(3)</a>, <a href="../man3/allocimage.html"><i>allocimage</i>(3)</a>, <a href="../man7/color.html"><i>color</i>(7)</a>,
    <a href="../man7/face.html"><i>face</i>(7)</a>, <a href="../man7/font.html"><i>font</i>(7)</a><br>
    
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