Talk:PCX

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This article may be too technical for a general audience. Please help improve this article by providing more context and better explanations of technical details to make it more accessible, without removing technical details.

Contents 1 Too Technical 2 Last statement unrelated 3 Introduction improved 4 Comparison with BMP

[edit] Too Technical

This is a nice article, but too technical, or at least technical without explanations for the casual reader. Any experts feel like updating this? Wyatt Riot 22:41, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

i think so too, even though i have a high IQ (about 146) i mean, i thought that they were data/video files that would affect the game "icy tower" , because certain characters affect the way the "stuff" looks VFD642 1 january 2007

[edit] Last statement unrelated

The last statement should not be in this article since it refers to another meaning of PCX. Perhaps move it to another article; creating a disambiguation page for PCX would probably be necessary then.

PCX is the latest automation controller used in the Alstom Control systems . It is a variant of Industrial PC .

[edit] Introduction improved

Hello, I improved the introduction with a general paragraph about image file formats, which can aid (I think) to understood the basis of the PCX article. If you are satisfied with the simple description, you should untag the article.Ricardo Cancho Niemietz 17:51, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Article untagged. I like most of the changes, except one:

 The images are stored in [[computers]] as [[binary]] [[files]], which have the necessary data to
 represent such images (as their size in [[pixel|pixels]], the number of colors employed, etc),
 arranged internally in some way. Over the years, manufacturers developed many of such file formats,
 usually known by [[acronyms]]. The many [[software]] uses a given format, more ''de facto'' standard
 it becomes. A factor of a given format's success is its capability of [[data compression]], due to
 the images usually need important amounts of RAM memory and disk space.

While not totally irrelevant, this information is utterly non-specific to the PCX format. Keep in mind that this is an article about a graphics file format and not, say, Introduction to Computer Graphics 101. ;) --Stratadrake 03:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

(PS: Plural words can usually be wikilinked like this: [[link]]s .)

I agree with you, my added paragraph was very general. Simply, I tried to follow the instructions given in the tag. Curiously, after untag, the introduction has left *exactly* as it was.

I suggest that, in place of to drop completely the paragraph (and before to reedit the article), a mention could be made in the sense that the PCX was one of the first true image file formats used with IBM compatible PCs, due to the fact that early paint software simply dump the contents of the video buffer to a raw file. The Handmade Software's Image Alchemy tool, for example, still is capable to open such raw files (for example, John Bridges' PCPAINT .pic files), and it suppose their characteristics (res, color number) only based on the file size (due to every PC graphic mode has its own specific number of bytes).

Some years ago I wrote in C a PCX parser which supports every feature of the PCX format (even the 24 bit RGB flavour), so I planned to put in the article some details on PCX header; I think it is necessary due to the lack of a external link pointing to some public specification. And I'm sorry for not to have such a link; I lost the document source I used when I wrote the parser, but I still have my source code. I'll wait for your comments before I start with it, to kindly avoid a "war of editions".

Thanks also to note the plural style of wikilinks, but I think that for stylistic reasons, a single word should not to be in two colors. It's only my point of view.--Ricardo Cancho Niemietz 10:24, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I've added an external link to ZSoft's PCX specification. It can also be found in other places, such as Wotsit.org. (By the way, the wikilink problem you are talking about was fixed years ago: links is not in two colours.) --Zundark 13:40, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

By "true" image format I guess you mean display-independent format? Okay, that definitely sounds worth mentioning. (I remember writing a PCX parser in VB6 so I could use it in some DX7 rendering. That was pretty fun, but also pretty stressful.) --Stratadrake 01:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I've changed the intro paragraph in the commented sense. I hope it was adquire a definitive (or, at least, more stable) form. I'm also studyng how to give more technical details about the format without "paste" the entire specification. Thanks for put the link. And, due to I am a recent wikipedia member, I wasn't aware about the plural wikilinks issue.Ricardo Cancho Niemietz 09:59, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comparison with BMP

I comparison with BMP would be very helpful. –Wulf (talk) 21:41, 28 January 2008 (UTC)