Face: or X-Face:

Face: or X-Face:

[Aaron Hsu]

The recent thread on X-Faces made me think. I realize that I am seeing
the color Face: headers, but nothing more than that. I think there is
something wrong with my viewer. However, when I used to have X-Face
support working, I always thought that it was just in Black and White.

This begs the question, what is the 'better' format to use? Face: or X-Face:?
-- 
Aaron Hsu <spam@sacrificumdeo.net> Jabber: arcfide@xmpp.us
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Re: Face: or X-Face:

[Hadron Quark]

you can see both in gnus : ensure you have compface package installed.

as for the rest : I guess many would say x-face since its B&W and less
bandwidth : although, frankly, times and bandwidths have changed - it
depends if you want to appease those with very, very bandwidth. Even an
x-face uses bytes - but can be very small (relatively) too.

Re: Face: or X-Face:

[David Z Maze]

Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> writes:

> as for the rest : I guess many would say x-face since its B&W and less
> bandwidth : although, frankly, times and bandwidths have changed - it
> depends if you want to appease those with very, very bandwidth. Even an
> x-face uses bytes - but can be very small (relatively) too.

I think in an era where most people are generating MIME mails with
duplicate text/plain and text/html parts and the HTML is pretty
groady, spending 2K for a picture in an otherwise compact plain-text
message isn't being that wasteful.  :-)

As far as Face vs. X-Face goes, to my knowledge only Gnus uses Face,
but its format is fairly obvious and I could imagine hacking it into
my favorite other open-source mail reader [1].  X-Face is a stranger
but more compact format, but there's at least one other mailer that
uses it (EXMH, IIRC).

  --dzm

[1] ...but that's mutt (sometimes starting Emacs, with spam-split.el
    turned on using nnml backed by AFS, is just too slow).  Maybe
    aalib deals with PNG files...

Re: Face: or X-Face:

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> writes:

> As far as Face vs. X-Face goes, to my knowledge only Gnus uses Face,
> but its format is fairly obvious and I could imagine hacking it into
> my favorite other open-source mail reader [1]. 

Support for the Face header seems to be spreading.  There's an
extension for Thunderbird, kmail seems to be getting support, and
Balsa has support for it.

Microsoft Outlook next.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Face: or X-Face:

[Reiner Steib]

On Mon, May 01 2006, Aaron Hsu wrote:

> The recent thread on X-Faces made me think. I realize that I am seeing
> the color Face: headers, but nothing more than that. I think there is
> something wrong with my viewer. 

The current manual (Gnus 5.10.8) says:

,----[ (info "(gnus)X-Face") ]
|    Viewing an `X-Face' header either requires an Emacs that has
| `compface' support (which most XEmacs versions has), or that you have
| suitable conversion or display programs installed.  If your Emacs has
| image support the default action is to display the face before the
| `From' header.  If there's no native `X-Face' support, Gnus will try to
| convert the `X-Face' header using external programs from the `pbmplus'
| package and friends.  For XEmacs it's faster if XEmacs has been
| compiled with `X-Face' support.  The default action under Emacs without
| image support is to fork off the `display' program.
| 
|    On a GNU/Linux system, the `display' program is from the ImageMagick
| package.  For external conversion programs look for packages with names
| like `netpbm', `libgr-progs' and `compface'.
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
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