Now I'm thinking how to reconcile the typical layered pixmap editor that Deluxe Draw aims to implement with the ZX Spectrum colour model.

That would require the editor to support layers of different resolutions:

1. background plane with attributes (32 x 24)
2. bitmap plane on top acquiring colours from the attribute layer underneath.

It could conceivably be construed as a blend mode of sorts. That might possibly work.

The blend mode seems doable, the different resolutions per layer is more tricky or possibly hacky.

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There are two reasons why I needed to get palette handling done early on during the development of Deluxe Draw:

1. You need palettes for themes, and you need themes for a decent GUI. If every new colour you use is an improvised hack you end up with terrible looking GUIs of the sort everyone has decided not to use.

2. You can't have standard system icons if you don't agree on a stable palette. I needed to stabilise at least one minimal palette so I could have a regular icon format, and icons for Deluxe Draw.

The Deluxe Pixmap Format (.dpf) is a text-based that is easy to read and write. The child of .xmp pixmaps and .bdf fonts. XMP pixmaps are cool but they only store one single image. BDF fonts are cool but they only store monochrome bitmaps. DPF is meant to store any number of named indexed-colour icons or glyphs.

You can only know how these icons are going to look in another system if you guarantee a stable palette is going to be available.

So there you go.

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To be honest, it may never be integrated with the main application when it's a delivered product. But it's exercises like this where you learn the most, finding out what are the limits of extensibility and what the level of pain will be like for other developers using this stuff.

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Because I'm ahead of schedule I feel I am morally allowed to go down rabbit holes like... working on a Windows 98 theme for the Deluxe Draw UI toolkit... hehehehe 🤣

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I think I've got BDF font rendering right.

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Dropdown menus render exactly right. Also some room for improvement there behaviourally speaking.

Not a minor aspect now, considering that the last re-write has seen a clean separation of the UI logic and the backend. I could try an alternative backend in GL or SDL as a canary to ensure the app-level code always remains backend-independent.

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