I too want to have an X-Face

I too want to have an X-Face

[Dan Jacobson]

I too want to have an X-Face.  You know, that thing in the headers
that causes your face to pop up in gnus.  It sure is hard to dig up
information on how to do it.

See, I tried:
	convert -size 48x48 jidanni.org/images/19990716danhead.gif \
	./danhead.xbm; compface danhead.xbm
of course I'm way off.

So, starting with a gif, how do I get the bloody X-Face: header, say
for just when I post to gnu.* and debian groups?
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780

Re: I too want to have an X-Face

[Glyn Millington]

Dan Jacobson <jidanni@dman.ddts.net> writes:

> I too want to have an X-Face.  You know, that thing in the headers
> that causes your face to pop up in gnus.  It sure is hard to dig up
> information on how to do it.
>
> See, I tried:
> 	convert -size 48x48 jidanni.org/images/19990716danhead.gif \
> 	./danhead.xbm; compface danhead.xbm
> of course I'm way off.
>
> So, starting with a gif, how do I get the bloody X-Face: header, say
> for just when I post to gnu.* and debian groups?

Dan,

Some of this may be irrelevant to you because it is from the Xemacs FAQ,
but may help.....

Glyn M




Q5.3.10: How can I get those oh-so-neat X-Face lines?
-----------------------------------------------------

   Firstly there is an ftp site which describes X-faces and has the
associated tools mentioned below, at
`ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu:/pub/faces/'.

   Then the steps are

  1. Create 48x48x1 bitmap with your favorite tool

  2. Convert to "icon" format using one of xbm2ikon, pbmtoicon, etc.,
     and then compile the face.

  3.      cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon |compface > file.face

  4. Then be sure to quote things that are necessary for emacs strings:

          cat ./file.face | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g'
          | sed 's/\"/\\\"/g' > ./file.face.quoted

  5. Then set up emacs to include the file as a mail header - there
     were a couple of suggestions here--either something like:

          (setq  mail-default-headers
                 "X-Face:  <Ugly looking text string here>")

     Or, alternatively, as:

          (defun mail-insert-x-face ()
            (save-excursion
              (goto-char (point-min))
              (search-forward mail-header-separator)
              (beginning-of-line)
              (insert "X-Face:")
              (insert-file-contents "~/.face")))
          
          (add-hook 'mail-setup-hook 'mail-insert-x-face)

   However, 2 things might be wrong:

   Some versions of pbmtoicon produces some header lines that is not
expected by the version of compface that I grabbed. So I found I had to
include a `tail +3' in the pipeline like this:

     cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon | tail +3 |compface > file.face

   Some people have also found that if one uses the `(insert-file)'
method, one should NOT quote the face string using the sed script .

   It might also be helpful to use Stig's <stig@hackvan.com> script
(included in the compface distribution at XEmacs.org) to do the
conversion.

   Contributors for this item:

   Paul Emsley, Ricardo Marek, Amir J. Katz, Glen McCort, Heinz Uphoff,
Peter Arius, Paul Harrison, and Vegard Vesterheim