Color planes shortage, acroread 5.0 on solaris/vnc

[Shing-Fat Fred Ma]

Please excuse the multiple postings, but I'm
getting use to netscape 7.0, crashing as I go,
and retyping postings as they are lost.  Hopefully,
I've cancelled most of the prior postings.

Here are additional details that I forgot to
retype.  Reader 5.0 does not run into the
problems described below if I start the VNC
server with 24-bits of true color, nor if it is
default (8-bits, if memory is correct) pseudocolor.
The problem does arise if I use 9-bits true color.

Has anyone had success stories of Acrobat
Reader 5.0 displaying to a VNC display on
solaris?  Did you have to resort to 24-bits?

Fred

-- 
Fred Ma, fma@doe.carleton.ca
Carleton University, Dept. of Electronics
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1S 5B6



Shing-Fat Fred Ma wrote:

>   Hello,
>
> I'm using tightVNC 1.2.2, accessing solaris8
> from WinME.  Our Sun administrator recently
> upgraded from Acrobat Reader 4.0 to 5.0.
> Reader warns that it doesnt' have
> enough colors, starts up in grayscale, and
> displays the document a pitch black.
>
> According to Reader's README, Reader's
> warning is expected if invoked by netscape
> because netscape doesn't "grab" enough
> colors for Reader.  I'm not invoking it from
> netscape.  Furthermore, the default visual
> for TightVNC is 8-bit true-color.
>
> The README is a bit confusing here because
> it says the problem occurs when the visual
> is 8 planes or less, but then it attributes the
> problem to netscape not grabbing enough colors,
> and suggests starting acroread first.  That's too
> different causes.
>
> The problem does not occur if I start up the VNC
> server as pseudocolor.  But it's not very convenient
> to startup up a VNC desktop everytime just to use
> Reader.  I tried using 9-bits color depth, in case
> there was anything to the README story, but that
> didn't help either.
>
> Any ideas?  I know that I don't understand the
> color alottment scheme of VNC very well.  I did
> play around with it for a good long time in the past,
> trying to find a good color scheme for the syntax
> enabled source code viewing of gvim.  What I found
> is that when, say, 2 bits are allotted to one of RGB,
> I don't really get 4 levels of that color (which is what
> I thought I would get).  I seem to recall that the number
> of colors was about half what I would expect, so a bit
> is lost for each color somewhere.  This is on a TFT
> screen, so there might be issues of linearity and sensitivty
> there; I'm not familiar with that technology.
>
> Thanks for any ideas.
>
> Fred
>
> P.S.  Another way to solve the Reader 5.0 problem
> is to make it work the way 4.0 did.  Never had a
> problem with colors in 4.0.  Is there a way to do this?