Technical Q&A

QD56 - Parsing the PICT File Format (10-February-98)

Q I am looking for the PICT file format, but I can't find it anywhere. Can you help?

A The PICT file format is documented in Appendix A of " Inside Macintosh: Imaging with QuickDraw," which is available on Apple's Developer World web site.

Apple does not recommend reading or writing PICTs directly -- instead, use the usual documented QuickDraw routines (e.g. OpenCPicture, ClosePicture, DrawPicture). For example, if you wanted to parse a PICT for PicComments, you could define a commentProc and patch out the QuickDraw bottlenecks. This is guaranteed to work, while parsing PICTs directly requires writing and testing a fair amount of code, and is likely to break in the future.

-- Ingrid Kelly
Worldwide Developer Technical Support

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