compressed data expanded data

03 04 04 04 04
05 06 06 06 06 06 06
00 03 45 56 67 00 45 56 67
02 78 78 78
00 02 05 01 move 5 right and 1 down
02 78 78 78
00 00 end of line
09 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e 1e
00 01 end of rle bitmap

compression of 4-bits-per-pixel bitmaps

when the bicompression member of the bitmapinfoheader structure is set to
bi_rle4, the dib is compressed using a run-length encoded format for a
16-color bitmap. this format uses two modes: encoded mode and absolute mode.

encoded mode

a unit of information in encoded mode consists of two bytes. the first byte
of the pair contains the number of pixels to be drawn using the color

indexes
in the second byte.

the second byte contains two color indexes, one in its high-order nibble
(that is, its low-order 4 bits) and one in its low-order nibble.

the first pixel is drawn using the color specified by the high-order nibble,
the second is drawn using the color in the low-order nibble, the third is
drawn with the color in the high-order nibble, and so on, until all the
pixels specified by the first byte have been drawn.

the first byte of the pair can be set to zero to indicate an escape that
denotes the end of a line, the end of the bitmap, or a delta. the
interpretation of the escape depends on the value of the second byte of the
pair. in encoded mode, the second byte has a value in the range 0x00 through
0x02. the meaning of these values is the same as for a dib with 8 bits per
pixel.

absolute mode

in absolute mode, the first byte contains zero, the second byte contains the
number of color indexes that follow, and subsequent bytes contain color
indexes in their high- and low-order nibbles, one color index for each

pixel.
each run must be aligned on a word boundary.

following is an example of a 4-bit rle bitmap (the one-digit hexadecimal
values in the second column represent a color index for a single pixel):

compressed data expanded data

03 04 0 4 0
05 06 0 6 0 6 0
00 06 45 56 67 00 4 5 5 6 6 7
04 78 7 8 7 8
00 02 05 01 move 5 right and 1 down
04 78 7 8 7 8
00 00 end of line
09 1e 1 e 1 e 1 e 1 e 1
00 01 end of rle bitmap

bitmap example

the following example is a text dump of a 16-color bitmap (4 bits per

pixel):

win3dibfile
bitmapfileheader
type 19778
size 3118
reserved1 0
reserved2 0
offsetbits 118
bitmapinfoheader
size 40
width 80
height 75
planes 1
bitcount 4
compression 0
sizeimage 3000

xpelspermeter 0
ypelspermeter 0
colorsused 16
colorsimportant 16
win3colortable
blue green red unused
[00000000] 84 252 84 0
[00000001] 252 252 84 0
[00000002] 84 84 252 0
[00000003] 252 84 252 0
[00000004] 84 252 252 0
[00000005] 252 252 252 0
[00000006] 0 0 0 0
[00000007] 168 0 0 0
[00000008] 0 168 0 0
[00000009] 168 168 0 0
[0000000a] 0 0 168 0
[0000000b] 168 0 168 0
[0000000c] 0 168 168 0
[0000000d] 168 168 168 0
[0000000e] 84 84 84 0
[0000000f] 252 84 84 0
image
.
. bitmap data
.

icon-resource file format

an icon-resource file contains image data for icons used by windows