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.