@ Bill Benner: ILDA Color Table and LD

[patrick]

Hi Bill,<p>let me ask you a thing about LD: Do you support the ILDA color table format header (format code 2) color lookup table when importing ILDA frames, or do you ignore this format header and use the standard ILDA palette instead.<p>In my opinion every ILDA compatible software should support custom color tables. The reason why I'm asking ist just that I've heard hardly anyone uses custom color tables.<p>Now I need to know.<p>Thanks,
Patrick<p>www.laserlight.de

[gento]

Pangolin ILDA Palette ?????
Red Green Blue
0 255 0 0
1 255 16 0
2 255 32 0
3 255 48 0
4 255 64 0
5 255 80 0
6 255 96 0
7 255 112 0
8 255 128 0
9 255 144 0
10 255 160 0
11 255 176 0
12 255 192 0
13 255 208 0
14 255 224 0
15 255 240 0
16 255 255 0
17 224 255 0
18 192 255 0
19 160 255 0
20 128 255 0
21 96 255 0
22 64 255 0
23 32 255 0
24 0 255 0
25 0 255 32
26 0 255 64
27 0 255 96
28 0 255 128
29 0 255 160
30 0 255 192
31 0 255 224
32 0 130 255
33 0 114 255
34 0 104 255
35 10 96 255
36 0 82 255
37 0 74 255
38 0 64 255
39 0 32 255
40 0 0 255
41 32 0 255
42 64 0 255
43 96 0 255
44 128 0 255
45 160 0 255
46 192 0 255
47 224 0 255
48 255 0 255
49 255 32 255
50 255 64 255
51 255 96 255
52 255 128 255
53 255 160 255
54 255 192 255
55 255 224 255
56 255 255 255
57 255 224 224
58 255 255 255
59 255 160 160
60 255 128 128
61 255 96 96
62 255 64 64
63 255 32 32
All other colors are the same as last<p>This is ?<p>Gruß Gento

[pangolinlaser]

Hello Patrick,<p>As many of you know, Pangolin has been one of the strongest supporters of ILDA since 1990. I am the Chairman of the ILDA Technical Committee, and Patrick was a board member for many years and even President for one year. I hope there is no doubt about the amount that Pangolin does support ILDA as an organization.<p>Pangolin was actually the very first company to support the ILDA file format -- even before Steve Heminover and Fred Fenning who actually originally came up with the format and proposed it to ILDA.<p>As the ILDA File Format evolved, it became "confused". Too many people got involved and it went from being a simple format for interchange to a rather complicated format with no less than three (conflicting) methods of encoding color. <p>As a result of the confusion, Pangolin chose to support only one color format -- the "least common denominator" and the one that had been used by the most prominent companies and most avid supporters at that time. As a result, we support the most-used ILDA color information, but we do not (currently) support the ILDA color table format.<p>Most recently, there has actually been some discussion within the ILDA Technical Committee (of which I am the chairman) to support 24-bit color information. This would be called the ILDA-24 format or something similar. If the ILDA Technical Committee (of which there are nine members total that must agree and vote on this) decides to move forward with this, then Pangolin would of course support this format. <p>In the mean time, people can use the most-used color table for ILDA frames. Although I have not compared every value, the table presented in another message looks correct.<p>Keep in mind that this is for interchange only -- to get frames from one system to another.<p>Pangolin actually supports something like nine *native* competitive file formats which we import perfect colors for. <p>Also keep in mind that Pangolin is a company that responds to customer demands. If there is a strong demand for better support of interchange file formats (or other native formats), we would certainly add this to an upgrade. In the mean time, we are working on revolutionary tools that our clients seem to be asking for every day.<p>Best regards,<p>William Benner
Pangolin Laser Systems

[patrick]

Hi Bill,<p>I don't really see a reason for not supporting ILDA color table data. This would have the benefit that not nine people have to vote on it and it will take months or years until I can program colors unsupported at present by the ILDA standard palette.<p>I hope you understand my point.<p>Best wishes
Patrick<p>@Gento: Thanks, but that wasn't quite the info I needed.

[pangolinlaser]

Well, the reasons are multi-faceted. First, up until now, I am not aware that other programs support this either. Second, the color table that we support is the same one used by the biggest users of the ILDA file format, and seems to be the only consistent use of the ILDA format. (There are many programs that claim to support the ILDA format but actually are bastardizing it in one way or another.)<p>Third and most importantly, there are a limited number of programmers over at Pangolin, and simultaneously a limited number of hours in each day. We at Pangolin feel that we must do the responsible thing, and use our time as wisely as we can, for the benefit of the majority of our users.<p>Pangolin is very much a company that allocates its development resources based on user requests. We put all of the requests into a database and prioritize the development effort based on the frequency of the requests, time required to implement, and other factors.<p>For the feature you are talking about (support for the ILDA color table), you are only the second person to request this in the history of our database (which goes back to 1995). We have many more requests for things like better beam sequencing support, enhanced Live! functions, etc. It is these things that we are concentrating our efforts on at the moment.<p>Again, it is the responsible thing to do. If I have to tell 50 people, sorry, you can't have your new beam functions because we took time to implement something that only 2 people asked for, this seems irresponsible.<p>All of that being said, again, I must insist that we listen to our users and implement things that there is interest in. <p>EVERYONE: PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE: If support for the ILDA Color Table is important to you, please send email to lasers@pangolin.com. If there are enough requests, then you will see this feature in the next update of LD2000.