color depth on Windows

color depth on Windows

[Maciej]

Hello all,

It's been a while since I used Emacs, and seeing how a new release
(22) came out recently, I decided to take it for a spin.  I downloaded
the latest Windows binaries from an official mirror.  According to
Help > About,

This is GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2007-06-02 on RELEASE

The problem I'm having is that when I run "runemacs.exe", the Emacs
window comes up in "low color" mode. That is, the gnu image on the
starting screen is dithered black&white and the toolbar is also in
black&white (I guess it's using the "low-color" subdirectory icons),
although other color-related items, like color themes, work fine at
first glance.  I am running this on Windows XP SP2 and the video
driver is running at color depth of 32bits.  Everything else runs fine
on this system.

How can I get Emacs to come up in non-"low color" mode?

Re: color depth on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 10/17/07, Maciej <mkalisiak@gmail.com> wrote:

> How can I get Emacs to come up in non-"low color" mode?

You surely lack the image libraries (which are not included in the
standard distribution). They can be downloaded from GnuWin32
(http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net).

Take a look at http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html#imagesupport

At that site you can also download a prebuilt binary for Windows
(including the image libraries), with some changes with respect to the
standard distribution. I personally don't like some of the changes,
but many Windows users seem to consider them quite useful.

             Juanma

Re: color depth on Windows

[Maciej]

On Oct 18, 4:35 am, "Juanma Barranquero" <lek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You surely lack the image libraries (which are not included in the
> standard distribution). They can be downloaded from GnuWin32
> (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net).
>
> Take a look at http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html#imagesupport
>
> At that site you can also download a prebuilt binary for Windows
> (including the image libraries), with some changes with respect to the
> standard distribution. I personally don't like some of the changes,
> but many Windows users seem to consider them quite useful.

Ah, that was indeed it.  I suspected the information was somewhere in
the Emacs documentation, but I was at a loss as to where to find it;
initial searches in the Emacs info pages didn't reveal anything (it
didn't help that I had a misconception of what was causing the
problem).  Anyhow, for (searchable) posterity, here are the relevant
bits, hopefully these will help out others that run into this:

Relevant bit from the README file, the one that resides in same
download directory as the Windows binary ZIP file:

* Image support

  Emacs 22.1 contains support for images, however for most image
formats
  supporting libraries are required.  This distribution has been
tested
  with the libraries that are distributed with GTK for Windows, and
the
  libraries found at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/. The following
image
  formats are supported:

      PBM/PGM/PPM: Supported natively by Emacs. This format is used
for
      the black and white versions of the toolbar icons.

      XPM: requires a Windows port of the XPM library 3.4 or later,
      which will be named xpm4.dll, libxpm-nox4.dll or
      libxpm.dll. This format is used for the color versions of the
      toolbar icons, and other images in Emacs.

      [snipped info for remaining graphic format libraries]


Necessary steps to make the libraries available:
1. go to http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

2. click on "Setup" links for "Xpm" and any other of the graphic
libraries you'd like available (i.e., those mentioned in the above
README)

3. once downloaded, run the setup programs for the libraries

4. IMPORTANT: you still have to tell Windows where to find the library
DLLs.  So you need to edit the Windows PATH environment variable to
include c:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin (you'll need to adjust the path
if you told the installers to install the libraries in a path other
than the default).

5. runemacs.exe now comes up with proper toolbars and colour gnu logo!

Afterthought: I really wish one of the opening screens of Emacs made
mention to the missing graphics libraries, in bold/red.  IMHO it is a
general expectation for programs to "just work" right out-of-the -box
in Windows (whether this ideal is reached is another story), and
properly colored toolbar icons would seem like a standard/necessary
feature of any Windows program.  As such, this lack of the XPM library
causes the default Emacs binary to be not fully functional, and it
would thus make sense to alert the user of the problem, and how to
solve it (in a more explicit/direct way than an optional README file).

Re: color depth on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 10/18/07, Maciej <mkalisiak@gmail.com> wrote:

> Afterthought: I really wish one of the opening screens of Emacs made
> mention to the missing graphics libraries, in bold/red.  IMHO it is a
> general expectation for programs to "just work" right out-of-the -box
> in Windows (whether this ideal is reached is another story), and
> properly colored toolbar icons would seem like a standard/necessary
> feature of any Windows program.  As such, this lack of the XPM library
> causes the default Emacs binary to be not fully functional, and it
> would thus make sense to alert the user of the problem, and how to
> solve it (in a more explicit/direct way than an optional README file).

I suggest you send that as a bug / feature request (with M-x report-emacs-bug).

             Juanma

Re: color depth on Windows

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Oct 18 2007, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> On 10/18/07, Maciej <mkalisiak@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Afterthought: I really wish one of the opening screens of Emacs made
>> mention to the missing graphics libraries, in bold/red.  IMHO it is a
>> general expectation for programs to "just work" right out-of-the -box
>> in Windows (whether this ideal is reached is another story), and
>> properly colored toolbar icons would seem like a standard/necessary
>> feature of any Windows program.  As such, this lack of the XPM library
>> causes the default Emacs binary to be not fully functional, and it
>> would thus make sense to alert the user of the problem, and how to
>> solve it (in a more explicit/direct way than an optional README file).
>
> I suggest you send that as a bug / feature request (with M-x
> report-emacs-bug).

There has been a discussion on including the DLLs in the next
emacs-22.*-bin-i386.zip file in July, see
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bugs/15799/focus=74093>.  I don't
know about the plans of Jason (IIRC, he has built the Windows
binaries), i.e. if he wants to provide "emacs-22.1-a-bin-i386.zip"
(including image DLLs) or do this for Emacs 22.2.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
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      (o o)
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