pixels: Document the naming convention

Whenever I have to fix something endianness-related, I always get
confused about whether the byte-oriented format that guarantees to put
red in byte 0 is RGBA8888 or RGBA32. (The answer is that it's RGBA32.)

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
This commit is contained in:
Simon McVittie 2023-09-29 15:49:24 +01:00 committed by Sam Lantinga
parent 04edb38cdf
commit 3698630bbc
1 changed files with 36 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@ -23,6 +23,42 @@
* \file SDL_pixels.h
*
* \brief Header for the enumerated pixel format definitions.
*
* SDL's pixel formats have the following naming convention:
*
* * Names with a list of components and a single bit count, such as
* RGB24 and ABGR32, define a platform-independent encoding into
* bytes in the order specified. For example, in RGB24 data, each
* pixel is encoded in 3 bytes (red, green, blue) in that order,
* and in ABGR32 data, each pixel is encoded in 4 bytes
* (alpha, blue, green, red) in that order. Use these names if the
* property of a format that is important to you is the order of
* the bytes in memory or on disk.
*
* * Names with a bit count per component, such as ARGB8888 and
* XRGB1555, are "packed" into an appropriately-sized integer in
* the platform's native endianness. For example, ARGB8888 is
* a sequence of 32-bit integers; in each integer, the most
* significant bits are alpha, and the least significant bits are
* blue. On a little-endian CPU such as x86, the least significant
* bits of each integer are arranged first in memory, but on a
* big-endian CPU such as s390x, the most significant bits are
* arranged first. Use these names if the property of a format that
* is important to you is the meaning of each bit position within a
* native-endianness integer.
*
* * In indexed formats such as INDEX4LSB, each pixel is represented
* by encoding an index into the palette into the indicated number
* of bits, with multiple pixels packed into each byte if appropriate.
* In LSB formats, the first (leftmost) pixel is stored in the
* least-significant bits of the byte; in MSB formats, it's stored
* in the most-significant bits. INDEX8 does not need LSB/MSB
* variants, because each pixel exactly fills one byte.
*
* The 32-bit byte-array encodings such as RGBA32 are aliases for the
* appropriate 8888 encoding for the current platform. For example,
* RGBA32 is an alias for ABGR8888 on little-endian CPUs like x86,
* or an alias for RGBA8888 on big-endian CPUs.
*/
#ifndef SDL_pixels_h_