🚀 go-pugleaf

	Given that we have been having a lot of fun with this recently,
I thought it would be a good time to ask the AVS community and AVS designers
about how AVS reads images, i.e., *.x files.

	We've noticed that on our DEC 5200s running AVS, that the
form of the various .x files in /usr/avs/data/image are often different.
In particular, the digital.x and the avs.x, seem to have their
bytes flipped in terms of the width (or nx) and height (ny) of
the picture.  Since these are the only pieces of information
in the images that specify the image size (no XDR type stuff in the file
like with a field), we're guessing that when the read image module
or the image viewer reads this file it tries to make some
sense of these numbers.  If they are wierd (like negative or large) it
tries to flip the Endian of ALL the values in the dataset (including
the data that defines the alpha, R, G, B of the image).

Is this true?  We found this out when we tried to write X apps
that read in AVS image files.  Some seem to work fine but others died
because they were not flipping the Endian.  We assumed that all the .x files
were the same type.  Forgive us!

You can see this quite easily by using the 'od' command on a couple of
these files (like digital.x and avs.x).

Allen V. R. Schiano
Advanced Scientific Computing
Office of Academic Computing
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, Ca 92727
schiano@uci.edu