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From: Michael Albin <albin@infomatik.uni-kl.de>
Subject: Q: More colors in VW 2.0 ?
Message-ID: <1995Feb7.101729.3637@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de>
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Organization: University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 10:17:29 GMT
Lines: 24

Does anybody know how I could get more colors out of VisualWorks ?

We do some image processing here and would like to have a lot of fine
gray scales. Dithering is not acceptable. As I understand, VW runs the
primitive Screen>>getDeviceColorMap to allocate its colors. 

Unfortunately it seems that VW exactly knows, which colors it wants, 
so that other colors will not be usable. If I start VW on 
a 256 color display, I can use 141 *real* (in opposite to dithered)
colors. If I first start another program which allocates a lot of color 
entries for itself (like XV), then VW can not use its preferred 
colors. But instead of allocating the colors it can get, you can just 
use a small number of colors now.

For example, I start XV with a 256-grayscale picture. Now all colors
(except 8, which is neglegible) in the system color map are grayscales.
Then I start VW and my Screen colorPalette has only 19 grayscales (!!!).

Does anybody know what to do in such a case? I hate programs which 
are too intelligent.

P.S.: I run VW 2.0 on a Sun Workstation.


