[R] Colour depth reduced to 12 by bitmap devices

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Clive Jenkins wrote:

> Prof Brian D Ripley wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Clive Jenkins wrote:
> > 
> > > I am using R to create colour plots as bitmap files. I have created a
> > > palette of 256 colours that I want to use, but the resultant output
> > > files contain only 12 colours used in dither patterns. The result is the
> > > same whether I use bmp() or png().
> > 
> > What about bitmap()?  Have you tried that?
> 
> I missed that one (it does not appear in the top-level List of Graphical
> Devices in Devices.html or the output of ?device). I have tried it now,

Well, it is new and not really a device.  It is in the NEWS file, and if
you have looked in the See Also for ?device you would have got to it
(it is with dev2bitmap).


> but it only gives me 71 colourswith no dithering. This seems to be
> independent of the screen graphics mode.
> 
> > Internally bmp/png/jpeg use take a copy of the screen, so what you get
> > depends on your graphics card driver. If you are seeing dithering in the
> > PNG file, do you see it on screen?  Is your screen set to a truecolour
> > mode?
> 
> Yes, it is the same on-screen. I had not observed this before because I
> have not been displaying the results on-screen: I thought I might avoid
> any Windows-related colour restrictions by generating an image file
> directly. This use of the graphics hardware would seem to imply that
> bmp/png/jpeg cannot be used to create bitmap files using rterm on a
> "traditional" UNIX machine with text-only terminals.

Rterm does not run on Unix!  bmp is Windows only, and png/jpeg are
implemented via the X11 device on Unix.

It is not the hardware but the software that is used. How do you think 
you are going to plot on a bitmap without using the graphics subsystem?
Think about font handling, for example?  That's why bitmap() is available,
which uses ghostscript to do this.

If you have better ideas, you are welcome to contribute them.


> My screen was set to a 256-colour mode. After changing to a truecolour
> mode, bmp() and png() now work exactly as I would expect (but I find my
> image contains only 245 colours because of duplicates in my palette). 
> 
> > bitmap() works via ghostscript.
> > 
> > > How can I get the true colours that I specified instead of dither
> > > patterns? (making the driver's job easier!)
> > >
> > > I am using R 1.1.0 for Windows (rw1010). The attached files are:-
> > >
> > >  src256.R     Test program to be run by source("src256.R")
> > >  col_256.R    Colour palette read by src256.R
> > >  col_256.dat  Test data representing a 16x16 square image using
> > >               all 256 colours
> > >  Rplot.png    The resulting bitmap.
> > >
> > > If anyone can improve on my code in src256.R, then please do so!
> > >
> > > A further problem is that I cannot reduce the point size of the tick
> > > labels (character strings in this case) using any of:-
> > >
> > >  par(cex=0.2)
> > >  par(cex.axis=0.2)
> > >  axis(..., cex=0.2, ...)
> > >  axis(..., cex.axis=0.2, ...)
> 
> This problem, although minor, is still unresolved. cex and cex.axis
> settings also seem to be ignored when passed to image().

Perhaps you would like to resolve them and contribute a patch?
If this is a bug report, please submit it to the R-bugs database.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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