This chapter discusses how to:
All functions, types, and symbols in this chapter with the prefix ``Xcms'' are defined in <X11/Xcms.h>. The remaining functions and types are defined in <X11/Xlib.h>.
Functions in this chapter manipulate the representation of color on the screen. For each possible value that a pixel can take in a window, there is a color cell in the colormap. For example, if a window is four bits deep, pixel values 0 through 15 are defined. A colormap is a collection of color cells. A color cell consists of a triple of red, green, and blue values. The hardware imposes limits on the number of significant bits in these values. As each pixel is read out of display memory, the pixel is looked up in a colormap. The RGB value of the cell determines what color is displayed on the screen. On a grayscale display with a black-and-white monitor, the values are combined to determine the brightness on the screen.
Typically, an application allocates color cells or sets of color cells to obtain the desired colors. The client can allocate read-only cells. In which case, the pixel values for these colors can be shared among multiple applications, and the RGB value of the cell cannot be changed. If the client allocates read/write cells, they are exclusively owned by the client, and the color associated with the pixel value can be changed at will. Cells must be allocated (and, if read/write, initialized with an RGB value) by a client to obtain desired colors. The use of pixel value for an unallocated cell results in an undefined color.
Because colormaps are associated with windows, X supports displays with multiple colormaps and, indeed, different types of colormaps. If there are insufficient colormap resources in the display, some windows will display in their true colors, and others will display with incorrect colors. A window manager usually controls which windows are displayed in their true colors if more than one colormap is required for the color resources the applications are using. At any time, there is a set of installed colormaps for a screen. Windows using one of the installed colormaps display with true colors, and windows using other colormaps generally display with incorrect colors. You can control the set of installed colormaps by using XInstallColormap() and XUninstallColormap().
Colormaps are local to a particular screen. Screens always have a default colormap, and programs typically allocate cells out of this colormap. Generally, you should not write applications that monopolize color resources. Although some hardware supports multiple colormaps installed at one time, many of the hardware displays built today support only a single installed colormap, so the primitives are written to encourage sharing of colormap entries between applications.
The DefaultColormap() macro returns the default colormap. The DefaultVisual() macro returns the default visual type for the specified screen. Possible visual types are StaticGray , GrayScale , StaticColor , PseudoColor , TrueColor , or DirectColor (see "Visual Types").