[cairo] The past, present and future of RGB16_565

["J.A. Magallón"]

On 2009.06.16, at 12:03, Jonathan Morton wrote:

>
> - The order of the components (usually one of RGB, BGR, ARGB, ABGR,
> RGBA, BGRA, or just A), and if there is any padding, which end of the
> word it goes (xRGB or RGBx).  This can be an extensible enum.
>

I have a suggestion about this, and about images in Cairo in general.
I have developed an app related to image processing, that works
with greyscale images. And I was surprised about how _difficult_
is to handle grey (8bit) images in Cairo.
Ihad to use tricks like painting in white using the 8bit channel as
alpha mask!!!
Why there is not a GRAY image format in Cairo ? Many apps would benefit
from it. And I think many hardware supports grey bitmaps directly,
without the need to use a RGB format.

Any special reason ? Could an 8bit (perhaps even 16bit) grey format
- something like CAIRO_FORMAT_G8 - be added to Cairo ?

TIA

--
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>     \               Software is  
like sex:
                                          \         It's better when  
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