HELP BITMAPFILE                                     David Young
                                                    January 1994

Bitmap files are used by X-window utilities to store such things as
icons and cursors.  The format is given in MAN * BITMAP; bitmap files
can be converted to a simple ASCII representation with bmtoa, and back
again with atobm, both of which are utilities described in the bitmap
man page. LIB * BITMAPFILE provides procedures to read and write the
ASCII representations of bitmap files; it is necessary to use bmtoa and
atobm as well to get to or from proper bitmap files.

This is not a suitable procedure for storing large arrays on disc; use
*SUNRASTERFILE, *DATAINOUT or the like for that purpose.

bitmapfile(FILENAME) -> ARRAY
        Reads the file whose name is given by the string FILENAME and
        returns a binary array - i.e. an array whose arrayvector is a
        bitvector (see HELP *BITVECTORS). The character "#" is
        represented as 1 in the array and the character "-" is
        represented as 0. The file must be in the format written by
        the updater of bitmapfile or by bmtoa.

ARRAY -> bitmapfile(FILENAME)
        Writes a file whose name is given by the string FILENAME, and
        whose contents are the data in ARRAY written in the style of
        bmtoa.  Every element of ARRAY equal to zero is written as the
        character "-"; all other elements are written as "#".  Thus the
        file only represents binary arrays properly.


--- $popvision/help/bitmapfile
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1994. All rights reserved.
