Creating and Loading a Custom Bit Map

An application can create a custom bit map by setting the bits in an array and passing the array to GpiCreateBitmap or by running the Icon Editor and loading the bit map with GpiLoadBitmap.

To create a custom bit map with an array, an application:

• Defines an array of bytes that will set pels in an image to the appropriate colors. This array of bytes typically represents the output of a scanned image.

• Sets the fields in the BITMAPINFOHEADER to their appropriate values.

• Sets the fields in the BITMAPINFO2 structure to their appropriate values.

• Calls GpiCreateBitmap, passes it the addresses of the structures and the array of bytes that the application has already defined, and sets the flOptions parameter to CBM_INIT.

If the application is to use this bit map as a fill pattern, it assigns the bit map a local identifier by calling GpiSetBitmapId.

To load a custom bit map that was created with the Icon Editor:

• Copy the bit map file to the directory in which you compile your application.

• Create a BITMAP entry in your application's resource file, assigning a unique integer identifier to the bit map.

• Call GpiLoadBitmap, passing it the identifier that you assigned to the bit map in the resource file.

An application can use GpiLoadBitmap to load any bit map from a file that conforms to any of the standard OS/2 bit-map formats or to a device-specific format supported by the device concerned. This means that an application can load a bit map created by another application, if that application created the correct bit-map header and stored the bit-map bits correctly.