Subject: Re: bug#963: no support for viewing bmp images?

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 18:17:25 +0200

Glenn Morris <[email-masked]> writes:

> Emacs 24.1 will be able to view bmp files through the ImageMagick
> library. However, it looks like this is not implemented for the Nextstep
> port (from examining configure), nor for MS Windows (?), ref thread
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-09/msg01579.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-10/msg00002.html
>
> The documentation doesn't seem to make this explicit, it probably
> should.

This is from 2011 and should probably have been closed, since we had
bmp support in Emacs 24.1.  But since it wasn't, here's the current
state of affairs AFAICT:

When I compile the current master branch using --with-imagemagick,
viewing bmp images works for me.  But imagemagick is now disabled by
default (and rightly so).  Without imagemagick compiled in I just get
garbled text when opening a bmp file.

Using Emacs 26.1 from Debian I can view BMP images just fine, as
expected, since it comes with imagemagick support.

It seems to me that Emacs is missing BMP support if built without
imagemagick.  It would be nice to not depend on that library for this
use case.

Thanks,
Stefan Kangas