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