Doug,

> Andreas, thanks for the changeset/update!  Yes, this is 
> basically what I wanted.

You're welcome.

> This update makes working in 8-bit mode a lot nicer in 
> general!

It sure looks a lot nicer now (though I hardly ever work in 8bpp ;)

> The lighter halftoned colors (e.g. the pastel Browser color) 
> look really good... you usually can't even see the halftoning. 
> The halftoning becomes more noticable in the duller colors,

Yeah - the problem is that there is only so much you can do with a balanced
2x2 stipple pattern. It might be worth checking if a better effect can be
achieved using different patterns - note that for 8bpp you could actually
get 4x4 pattern (since the pattern fills one word you can pack 4 different
pixel values in one word) but it's also limited in the number of colors that
can actually be represented. If you find a better method of generating the
dither patterns let us know! 

> I suppose conceivably there might be some people out there 
> who would like to turn off halftoning in 8-bit depth mode,
> so it might be nice to have a Preference to do that at some point.

Good point. Thanks for mentioning it!

  - Andreas