Ikon

Latest revision as of 21:07, 28 August 2024

The ikon image format was created in 1985 by Bell Labs for use in the vismon program.^[1] It was in use since at least 1985-02.^[2]

The format is readable as ASCII plaintext. It consists of comma-separated big-endian hexadecimal words each prefixed with 0x. In the words' binary representation, either every bit or every 2 bits represents a pixel. Plan 9 from Bell Labs uses a bit depth of two when the 11th (one-indexed) character is an ASCII comma, with a bit depth of one otherwise.^[3] Each pixel is black when all ones, and white when all zeros. Newline characters are significant; each line represents a row of pixels in the image (resulting in constraints on the image's width). Rows go from top to bottom and the pixels within the rows go from left to right.

[edit] Software

• Plan 9 from Bell Labs
• compface (see X-Face#Software)

[edit] References

1. ↑ Pike, R.; Presotto, D. L. (1985). "Face the Nation". Summer Conference Proceedings, Portland 1985. USENIX Association, pp. 81–86.
2. ↑ AT&T Bell Laboratories (1985-02). "Sysmon(9.1)" Unix Time Sharing System: Programmer's Manual, Eighth Edition, Volume 1.
3. ↑ readface() in /sys/src/cmd/faces/facedb.c of Plan 9 from Bell Labs