>>>>A heads up for Michel.
>>>>
>>>>When you view a message, at the bottom there is a row of icons: "view the first child message of this message", "reply", "view the map of this thread", etc. Often, but not all the time, these icons seem to be widened which is not visually attractive. I am refering to the icons after "reply" and "Map" in the attached bmp.
>>>>
>>>>Alex
>>>
>>>Did you attach anything with your reply?
>>
>>In this case I meant to. Let me try again. It is "Michel Fournier.bmp".... The file has been refuse because of size.
>
>I think only jpg and gif formats are supported.
Even if it was supported, bmp format is not compressed at all. It's more or less a simple video memory dump, three bytes per pixel. I've just picked up a 3696*2464 image, mostly dark, so it compressed well - the jpg was about 180K, and saved it as a bmp. There's some 54 bytes overhead so it was w*h*3+54... about 26 megs.
The only reason for proliferation of bmp format is that it requires about zero extra processing. It can be dumped straight into the video memory... provided there's no scaling, offsets, clipping etc... which was sort of fine with icons, they have a fixed size (*). The more plausible reason was that M$ wanted to be loved by hardware makers and sellers. More memory, more disk space, faster processors.... the year when newspaper article with a headline "Why are vendors smiling when you say you want a Windows machine" appeared was 1991. VFP didn't support anything but bmps until... VFP6, IIRC. In pretty any other M$ app the bmp worked right away, the other formats were somehow supported much later. Some of them weren't supported at all until gdi+, i.e. we had to wait for the fundamental graphic processing code at the system level to acknowledge the existence of these formats... while the most clumsy format was working everywhere... well, under every version of Windowses.
I'm still getting indigestion when I see a bmp saved to desktop - worst format, worst place.
(*) come see Ubuntu - icons are svg, vector graphics, arbitrary size. Size them as you like.
