Subject: Re: son of X-Face:

From: [email-masked] (Cameron Simpson)
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 93 13:13:58 +1000

| James Ashton wrote:
| > 	Resolution.  Almost certainly still 48x48.
| 
| I think restricting the image size so arbitrarily is a bad idea; 48x48 is
| really tiny!  All of my other icons are 64x64, and they just don't look all
| that large.  The same people who want color today will want bigger tomorrow.

I used to think this way too, but it uses up so much screen real estate. (And
all the xloads I have across the top of my screen are 50x50, so nyahh! :-).
Some problems with allowing arbitrary sized images are:

	- they don't tesselate with each other.
	- the images rapidly get too big to pump around as mail headers.
	  I fear the day when the headers outweigh the message text by orders
	  of magnitude.

Now one way of solving the size problem is to dither the image down to whatever
size is in use at display time, but for grainy images (i.e. 64x64) this
dithering is going to blur things a lot, and for non-grainy images (256x256
or whatever) the scaled down version may well lose important details, else
why was such resolution needed in the first place?

| I think a good approach might be to use the XPM3 format as the baseline, and
| find some way of compressing it efficiently.  It's a very nice format, in
| that it allows you to efficiently tune your image for color, grayscale, and
| monochrome devices without duplicating data.  Also there is a good library
| for managing color allocation, etc.

Where could one find the spec for this?
	- Cameron Simpson
	  [email-masked], DoD#743
--
!Peeve: doing an ol' fashioned manual spell check, I find "Himalayan" defined
in my Merriam-Webster New Kollegiate Diktionary only as "any of a breed of
small white domesticated rabbit..."  Huh?
	- David Farley, [email-masked]

---

From: Jamie Zawinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 93 20:25:58 PDT

Cameron Simpson wrote:
> I used to think this way too, but it uses up so much screen real estate.

But that's the point: as DPI goes up, the icons get *smaller*.  They don't
take up more mm on the glass, they just shrink.  Bigger pixel counts don't
translate to more screen real estate over time, they just translate to better
image quality.

> 	  I fear the day when the headers outweigh the message text by orders

They don't get big unless you make them big.  If someone doesn't want their
headers to swell, then they'll just use a 48x48 image, right?

> | I think a good approach might be to use the XPM3 format as the baseline,
> 

export.lcs.mit.edu: contrib/xpm3.2g.tar.Z or something close to that.  
I think a slightly older version also comes with X11R5.  The pbmplus 
toolkit can convert to xpm too.

	-- Jamie