I think the following may well stem from my failure to understand fully
how bitmaps work; I'd be very grateful if anyone can help me out.

I have a graphic field in a dBase database which I want to use to store
small 16 colour bitmaps. I'm creating these by drawing on the canvas of
a DBImage (it's a sort of catalog of a set of photgraphs). I can set the
palette to 16 colours before I start using ResizePalette, and I get a
resulting image with only 16 colours.

The problem is that when I do a post, the image is stored in the
database in a 256 colour format: the palette seems to have 240 colours
set to black, and the image is 8 bits per pixel. So my database is over
twice as big as I want it to be (I want it to be about 13Meg, it's over
28). Intriguingly, the 16 colours seem to occupy the first and last
eight entries in the palette (the last eight being the system colours, I
think).

The only way I have found to get the graphic field to store in 4bit
format is to SavetoFile, convert with a graphics utility, and then
LoadfromFile.

There must be an obvious way to do this that I have missed.

TIA

Mark

Mark Williams                   M...@polyhdrn.demon.co.uk
Polyhedron Software Ltd.        
Programs for Programmers - QA, Compilers, Graphics
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