pngEmbedder is the command-line tool I use to embed a paletted RGBA image into a C/C++ file.
pngEmbedder.c is a single C89 file that can be easily compiled this way:
gcc -Os --std=gnu89 -no-pie pngEmbedder.c -o pngEmbedder -lm
(or in a similar way using other compilers)
Input image: Tile8x8.png (512x512 pixels)
To reduce the number of colors we use pngnq (on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install pngnq) this way:
pngnq -n 75 Tile8x8.png
Paletted Image: Tile8x8-nq8.png (512x512 pixels)
Now we run:
./pngEmbedder Tile8x8-nq8.png
And we get Tile8x8-nq8.png.inl Please note that the .inl file is C/C++ compatible and contains at the bottom the complete instructions to decode it back to an RGBA array (without using any additional image library).
Once we have the .inl file we can easily load it back and optionally turn it back into a .png image (see Test/test.c)
Inline files are more compact if we can afford using a smaller number of colours in the palette, and a smaller image resolution.
Tip: we can flip the image vertically if we use:
./pngEmbedder -f Tile8x8-nq8.png