Possible problem with Bitmap formatting for screen captures

[EtherealMonkey]

Hello Marek,

This is a small issue, possibly even trivial and for all I know may be an issue only related to my Dev machine. I will try to confirm / deny this later by attempting to reproduce the problem on my server or another workstation.

Anyway, when taking a screen capture in BMP format, it appears that the encoding may not be complete or correct in some way.

Opening the file in Explorer (thumbnail), FreeCommander (thumbnail) and IrfanView all render the image correctly.

When I open the picture in Gimp, the results are much different. Looks like the alpha channel is corrupt, but I am not really an image expert.

Anyway, have a look:


OS: Windows XP Pro, SP3
FC: 2009.02 (Donor version)
Other apps running: IE8 , FireFox 3.5.1, Visual Studio 2008 Pro, Gimp 2.6.7

[EtherealMonkey]

To see if I could figure out what was wrong with the formatting, I took a screen capture of FreeCommander with the built-in capture feature, then did the same using IrfanView.

Then, using the Gimp, I opened the image which was created by FreeCommander. I cropped everything but the title bar (and a little of the menu bar, because I was guessing - with it being transparent and all ).

I did the same with the capture created with IrfanView and then opened the resulting images in Notepad2.

I think you will be able to see what it is exactly that Gimp doesn't like about the Bitmap format




I guess now the question is, what is the official Bitmap format? Is it supposed to be fault tolerant? i.e. Is this actually a "bug" in FreeCommander, or is the Gimp just being hard nosed about the compliance of the image formatting?

[EtherealMonkey]

Also, when I said "fault tolerant", I could have also said "culture invariant", as I suppose that this may be the case with the example at hand