I think you're overcomplicating things, especially with regards to converting into GIF/JPG or other file formats.

I'll insert my comments below without giving away too much. UDF 1 should be really simple, just read in the text file. UDF 2 is a little bit more complicated as it can involve the use of KiXforms or a second way. The second way is non-obvious but has a "doh!"-factor [Big Grin]

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Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the main idea of the Golf challenge was to see how small someone could code a given task, not figure out how to make a task work.
Task 1 is to read the text file into KiXtart. You already know it's an image file containing RGB colors for each point/pixel of the image. An image is a Width x Height array of pixels, with each pixel having a distinct RGB color, e.g. the row 1 column 1 pixel has an RGB color of &H000000, thus it's a white pixel.

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I'd love to participate, but I guess I'll have to wait till there is posted code.
I'm sure you'll get your own code going for this [Smile]
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I believe you if you say it can be done, but I have no idea how to have a native Windows app display the image. All the apps I know of open it as a text file not an image file or just won't open it period.
Yes, there is no way I am aware of that Windows apps can display the PxM files formats natively. However, one can use certain markup languages to create a display that contains colors. Also, these colors can be positioned on a per-pixel basis using certain markup language tags and the colors can be defined, e.g. as RGB colors.
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I've found a lot of code to convert the files to GIF/JPG using C but they don't seem too easy to convert to KiX.
GIF/JPG file formats can contain the NUL character, thus they are not suitable for KiXtart.

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Not sure what knowing the image colors has to do with the task. What good is knowing that each row is a list of colors and the header tells you the size, etc. Since most native apps want either BMP/TIFF/GIF/JPG I still don't know how to convert it to another format. I've seen the C code to do it, but it does not look that easy.
Why not use Excel to display an image? Just open Excel, select A1 and B2 and set the background color to black. Select A2 and B1, and set the background color to white. Result: A checkerboard image, especially if you make the cells equally sized squares [Wink]
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Maybe you could somehow use KF to display the given colors, but not sure if the image would really display correctly.
If KiXforms can display colors and the color points/lines/circles are all equally sized, then the image should accurately represent the image, shouldn't it?
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So... I'll just wait till someone show how to do it and then see how small I can code it. Maybe I can place 8 out of 8 players
I'm sure everybody will come up with something. Just remember to not overcomplicate things. And as this is more about coding than analyzing the tasks, I think it's fair if I give some help with regards to the way to solve the problems.
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