[R-sig-Geo] Reading 8-bit palette from tif

[Manuel Schneider]

Dear list

our mobile GPS performs very well with paletted tif. I have therefore cropped
large ortophotos to the local area of investigation and save them as tifs with
8-bit color palette from ArcGIS. The files are also attractive to be accessed
from R to be used as background in the display of results.
I can read the files easily using readGDAL. However, to display with image I
need the color table. I suceeded doing this using displayDataset from rgdal.
This looks like
im <-readGDAL(file)
cl <- displayDataset(GDAL.open(file))$col
image(im,col=cl)

My questions are:
- Is there is another, more direct way to the color palette infomation? I have
tried getColorTable() but this is giving something else.
- How can the automatic production of a plot by displayDataset be suppressed?
- How/if the 8-bit colorpalette in ArcGIS translates to any of GDALs tif options?

Any hints appreciated
Manuel