Export BMP

BMP (Windows Bitmap) - Export

The Windows BMP file format is a simple bitmap file format introduced and standardized with Windows version 3.0. It has been highly standardized and is extremely widespread. The format does not standardly support compression, but that can be easily applied with a separate compression program. Transparency is only provided with 32 bit color format, commonly revered to as Windows XP format. At the time of this writing, the 32 true color format is not widely supported so any use should be checked with the destination display application.

Colors are defined in an indexed fashion, using a finite list of colors. Usually 16 or 256 colors. More recent standards for this format allow for "True" colors defined as RGB (red, green, blue) 8 bit color components. The newest Windows XP standard supports an additional 8 bit alpha channel, i.e. transparency.

The file extension is BMP. The first two bytes of the file are the characters B and M. The OS 2 variant of this file format is not supported at this time.

The Width and Height of the image are defined by the named numeric entry fields. These values specify the image size in pixels, across and down. This corresponds loosely to Points on an EazyDraw drawing. Selected graphics are scaled and drawn in a rectangle of the specified size.

The Color Depth popup determines the encoding format used for colors with the bitmap. If 2, 16 or 256 colors are specified the Colors popup is used to specify the color table included in the exported file. If the 24 bit or 32 bit color method is selected, no color table applies and that popup menu is disabled.

The Color popup menu is used to select a color table for inclusion with the bmp file. All colors of the image are converted to the closest color found in the specified color list. The selection of Best 16 or Best 256 will automatically generate a color table from the EazyDraw drawing. A table is created with the colors used most frequently in the drawing. The other color lists shown on this popup menu are those found in the Colors folder of the User Preference Library folder.

The View Colors pull down list is used to review the colors of the specified color list, but not the automatically generated lists. There is no action associated with this menu, it is just provided for convenient review. The Color Picker.

The easiest way to draw and export with no scaling it is to enclose the graphics in a rectangle with a point size corresponding to the desired and specified pixel size. The rectangle can be changed to No Stroke and No Fill after drawing is complete. If all other graphics are inside this invisible rectangle, no scaling will be applied to the image.

256 colors are usually sufficient to depict most vector drawings. If photographs are included in the drawing, 256 colors will probably not be sufficient to properly represent the image. Also the use of several or complex color gradients will rapidly exceed 256 colors, so care must be used in this situation.

In most installations, the Color Lists are populated with pattern colors, this is the most common use for Color Lists on macOS. A list of color patterns can not be used with the bitmap format, as they are themselves bitmaps. The BMP format only supports RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color specifications. Any color list that contains at least one non-RGB color is disabled on the Color List Popup menu.