grayscale screen. This leads to the following diagram:
| Color | Gray-scale | |||
| R/O | R/W | R/O | R/W | |
| Undecomposed Colormap |
Static Color |
Pseudo Color |
Static Gray |
Gray Scale |
| Decomposed Colormap |
True Color |
Direct Color |
||
Conceptually, as each pixel is read out of video memory for display on the screen, it goes through a look-up stage by indexing into a colormap. Colormaps can be manipulated arbitrarily on some hardware, in limited ways on other hardware, and not at all on other hardware. The visual types affect the colormap and the RGB values in the following ways:
- For PseudoColor, a pixel value indexes a colormap to produce independent RGB values, and the RGB values can be changed dynamically.
- GrayScale is treated the same way as PseudoColor except that the primary that drives the screen is undefined. Thus, the client should always store the same value for red, green, and blue in the colormaps.
- For DirectColor, a pixel value is decomposed into separate RGB subfields, and each subfield separately indexes the colormap for the corresponding value. The RGB values can be changed dynamically.
- TrueColor is treated the same way as DirectColor except that the colormap has predefined, read-only RGB values. These RGB values are server dependent but provide linear or near-linear ramps in each primary.
- StaticColor is treated the same way as PseudoColor except that the colormap has predefined, read-only, server-dependent RGB values.
- StaticGray is treated the same way as StaticColor except that the RGB values are equal for any single pixel value, thus resulting in shades of gray. StaticGray with a two-entry colormap can be thought of as monochrome.
The red_mask, green_mask, and blue_mask members are only defined for DirectColor and TrueColor. Each has one contiguous set of bits with no intersections. The bits_per_rgb member specifies the log base 2 of the number of distinct color values (individually) of red, green, and blue. Actual RGB values are unsigned 16-bit numbers. The colormap_size member defines the number of available colormap entries in a newly created colormap. For DirectColor and TrueColor, this is the size of an individual pixel subfield.
To obtain the visual ID from a Visual, use XVisualIDFromVisual.
VisualID XVisualIDFromVisual (visual)
Visual *visual;
| |
| visual | Specifies the visual type. |
The XVisualIDFromVisual function returns the visual ID for the specified visual type.
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