The Poskanzer Bitmap Collection
                       Distribution of 06jan93
                    Previous distribution 24dec89


This is a collection of bitmaps, for use as background patterns,
clip-art, et cetera.  Bitmap means black&white only, no grayscale or
color.  Why the limitation?  When the collection began, in the
mid-80's, color screens were rare, and so quality B&W images were much
in demand.  These days, color screens are near-universal, and the
collection seems almost quaint.  However, there are still people out
there who only have B&W screens.  Besides, people still do B&W
photography for artistic reasons, right?

The bitmaps are stored as GIF files.  If you need them in some other
format, take a look at my "pbmplus" toolkit, widely available around
the net (for example, in ftp.ee.lbl.gov).  In previous versions of this
collection, the bitmaps were stored in X11 bitmap format.  This was
mainly because the only tool available then for putting an image on an
X11 root window was xsetroot, which only understood X11 bitmap format.
Now xv is available, so we can use GIF, which is a much nicer format.
Although GIF files are typically 8-bit colormapped images, the format
also works quite well for B&W.

Some of these bitmaps are copyrighted, but as far as I know none of them
have any restrictions on distribution.  However, there may still be
restrictions on their use.  For instance, the Digital Equipment logo is
trademarked, so even though my bitmap of it is not copyrighted, the
representation that results when you use it might get you into trouble.
In any case, if you know a reason why any of these bitmaps should not
be freely distributed, please let me know and I'll remove them from the
collection.

The collection currently has 1959 bitmaps of various sizes from 16x16
to 1600x1280  The total size is about 23 megabytes.  The bitmaps are
stored in a single layer of subdirectories organized by the first
letter of the bitmap, plus a few special sub-collections storied in
separate subdirs.  All the subdirectories have index files in the main
directory so that you can grep for subjects of interest.  For instance,
to find all Escher pictures: "grep -i escher *.idx".  There's also a
separate CREDITS file containing for codes for who did what.

More bitmaps are always welcome!  Mail submissions to one of the
addresses below, or tell me where I can FTP them from.  The best way to
email bitmaps is to convert them to GIF files, uuencode them, and then
split them into multiple parts if the result is bigger tham 50K.
Examples:

    uuencode smallbitmap.gif smallbitmap.gif > smallbitmap.gif.uu
    mail -s smallbitmap.gif.uu jef@netcom.com < smallbitmap.gif.uu

    uuencode largebitmap.gif largebitmap.gif > largebitmap.gif.uu
    split -500 largebitmap.gif.uu largebitmap.gif.uu
    foreach i ( largebitmap.gif.uu?? )
	mail -s $i jef@netcom.com < $i
    end

Thank you for your support.

    Jef Poskanzer  jef@netcom.com  jef@well.sf.ca.us