Ikon

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File Format
Name Ikon
Ontology
Extension(s) (none)
Compression lossless
Magic Bytes 0x
Spec http://p9f.org/magic/man2html/6/face
Spec Availability free
Developed By Bell Labs
Released 1985

The ikon image format was created in 1985 by Bell Labs for use in the vismon program.[1] It was in use since at least 1985-02.[2]

The format is readable as ASCII plaintext. It consists of comma-separated big-endian hexadecimal words each prefixed with 0x. In the words' binary representation, either every bit or every 2 bits represents a pixel. Plan 9 from Bell Labs uses a bit depth of two when the 11th (one-indexed) character is an ASCII comma, with a bit depth of one otherwise.[3] Each pixel is black when all ones, and white when all zeros. Newline characters are significant; each line represents a row of pixels in the image (resulting in constraints on the image's width). Rows go from top to bottom and the pixels within the rows go from left to right.

Software

References

  1. Pike, R.; Presotto, D. L. (1985). "Face the Nation". Summer Conference Proceedings, Portland 1985. USENIX Association, pp. 81–86.
  2. AT&T Bell Laboratories (1985-02). "Sysmon(9.1)" Unix Time Sharing System: Programmer's Manual, Eighth Edition, Volume 1.
  3. readface() in /sys/src/cmd/faces/facedb.c of Plan 9 from Bell Labs
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