colromaps/visuals

[Mlacage aol com]

hi,

my question of the day: today, i went down to gdk_rgb/gdk/xlib stuff (after 
libart...)

Well, it seems that i lack some background informtion on graphics systems:
first, what is a PSEUDO COLOR STATIC visual ?

Second, what is a colorcube (from gdkrgb) ? i more or less understand what a 
colormap is but a colorcube ?? Is it only used for dithering ?
 btw: how should i use gdk_rgb ? 
gdk_rgb_init, then a call to one of gdk_draw_*_image ?
If so: stop me when i am wrong: 32_rgb buffers are simple arrays each entry 
beeing  4 bytes : r, g, b and alpha. but indexed buffers are just arrays 
where each entry a a byte beeing the offset in our colormap lookup table 
(which we build with gdk_rgb_colormap_new).

third, if i understood well the various answers i had from people here (thank 
you everyone for bearing my answers and answering them), libart may rander in 
an rgb buffer its pixbuf buffer. so: 
image-file -> gdk-pixbuf : pixbuf buffer . transforms -> gdk-rgb : GdkImage 
drawn in a GdkDrawable with a call to gdk_draw_image
mm... this is a lot of work: it is really fast ?

Thanks for any answers.
Mathieu

BTW: i downloaded gdk-pixbuf... VERY nice architecture miguel. I suppose this 
thing will a transformed into a bonobo component someday. I would nicer to 
use it than the sample bonobo img/x-png component...