Because this can have a significant effect on the display of small graphics such as icons, the Workspace developer tools for working with icons guarantee that pixels in the defining format are reproduced as physical screen pixels rendered by the CommonPoint system. This one to one mapping is guaranteed primarily to accommodate lower resolution devices.

For icons defined by GIF images, each pixel is considered to be 1.0 x 1.0 GCoordinates. For example, if a given monitor renders one pixel per GCoordinate, then the GIF image is displayed the way it was probably expected to, with one screen pixel per defining pixel.

For icons defined from Adobe Illustrator `88 graphics, each Postscript point is considered equivalent to one GCoordinate, and control points at integer values in PostScript are mapped to integer GCoordinate values (in other words, no subpixel shift occurs). For example, if a given monitor renders one pixel per GCoordinate, then the graphic is displayed in the same way as the drawing program that was used to create it.

The CommonPoint system runs on systems with a minimum color capability of 8 color index bits per pixel, and uses a fixed 256-color table. For more information about color tables, refer to the 2-D and 3-D Graphics volume.

The CommonPoint system is targeted to run on implementations with screen device types of varying resolution. As a general rule, however, you can expect an average resolution of 80 GCoordinates per inch. (The AIX CommonPoint platforms have a resolution of 92 GCoordinates per inch.)