Subject: CVS dane fvwm-web: * screenshots/make-thumb.sh: Shell to create thumbnails.

From: CVS <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 10:16:37 -0600 (CST)

CVSROOT:	/home/cvs/fvwm
Module name:	fvwm-web
Changes by:	dane	01/01/21 10:16:37

Modified files:
	screenshots    : index.html 
Added files:
	screenshots    : An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk2-1152x864.gif 
	                 An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk2-thumbnail.gif 
	                 An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk3-1152x864.gif 
	                 An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk3-thumbnail.gif 
	                 S_Anderson-desk-1024x768.gif 
	                 S_Anderson-desk-thumbnail.gif make-thumb.sh 

Log message:
* screenshots/make-thumb.sh: Shell to create thumbnails.
* screenshots/index.html:
* screenshots/An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk2-1152x864.gif:
* screenshots/An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk2-thumbnail.gif:
* screenshots/An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk3-1152x864.gif:
* screenshots/An_Thi_Nguyen_Le-desk3-thumbnail.gif:
* screenshots/S_Anderson-desk-1024x768.gif:
* screenshots/S_Anderson-desk-thumbnail.gif: More screenshots.

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From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 11:20:57 -0600

> Changes by:	dane	01/01/21 10:16:37

Maybe to create index2.html, index3.html? It is going to load forever.

Regards,
Mikhael.

---

From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 13:35:55 -0500

> Maybe to create index2.html, index3.html? It is going to load forever.

No more than 3 seconds on my cable modem.

The thumbnails are pretty small.

Anyone have 56K?  How long does it take to load the whole page?

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From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 12:46:14 -0600

> Anyone have 56K?  How long does it take to load the whole page?

With my modem (3-4Kb/sec max) all thumbnails (200Kb) take a minute.
I myself has no problem, I have all them locally. We should ask users.

If we already speak about thumbnails. Thumbnails created by convert
has much better quolity (compare my screenshot's thumbnails for example).
But this is also their disadvantage, xv preserves original colors,
while convert adds new (up to 255) usually causing a much greater size.

Regards,
Mikhael.

---

From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 15:23:25 -0500

> I myself has no problem, I have all them locally. We should ask users.

Well, no one has complained yet.  :)

I'd rather not split them up, any splitting we do will be arbitrary,
and looking at screenshots on a slow connection is supposed to be slow.

> while convert adds new (up to 255) usually causing a much greater size.

Well, now that you made me look, I think the quality is worse.
I can't see any of the text in the images created by convert.
(Loss of detail.)

...

I spent a little time trying different parameters.

Right now, I see that "-colors 64" has a dramatic effect on file
size (smaller than xv) with no visible effect on quality.
I tried numbers as low as 30 which makes the file really small
and it still looks good.

Using "-equalize" boosts the quality beyond xv by quite a bit.
Detail comes back even better than xv which in comparison
is uneven when it shows text.

Interlacing is another option we can use which  should help the images
appear early.

I think this will take a little fooling around to get right.
Feel free to play along.

---

From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 17:03:25 -0500

> I spent a little time trying different parameters.

I like:

-interlace Line
-colors 32 -colorspace YUV
-equalize

Later I plan to remove all the thumbs in the screenshots directory
and instead generate them in ../generated/thumbnails/.

Hmm, I  use a similar  script to create  thumbnails and html pages for
digital photos from company events.   I wonder how  this will work for
photos instead of screenshots.

---

From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 14:06:36 -0600

> -colors 32 -colorspace YUV

My version of convert does not compress gifs well; -compress LZW does not
help. If you load a gif generated by convert into xv and resave it, the
size may be decreased in more than twice.

However convert generates very small jpg files from gifs, smaller than xv,
and a quolity is good, no needs in -colors 32.

I think I would suggest jpg thumbnails, full screenshots may remain gifs.

Regards,
Mikhael.

---

From: "Paul D. Smith" <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Jan 2001 16:03:32 -0500

%% Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]> writes:

  mg> My version of convert does not compress gifs well; -compress LZW
  mg> does not help. If you load a gif generated by convert into xv and
  mg> resave it, the size may be decreased in more than twice.

Is this because the GIF compression algorithm is patented, and a free
package like convert doesn't include it?  I've seen "ungif" libraries
that provide the GIF creation API but _don't_ contain the LZW code.

I prefer to stick with JPG and/or PNG all over, and avoid GIF altogether
when it's reasonable to do so.

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From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 16:36:02 -0500

> that provide the GIF creation API but _don't_ contain the LZW code.

My version of ImageMagik has --enable-lzw as a configure option.
It defaults to no, and I don't think I overrode it.

I guess this explains the size and shows one way  we might get smaller
sizes.

> when it's reasonable to do so.

I'd have to check the mail archives to see why we settled on gif.
I guess we had our reasons.

---

From: Michael Han <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 13:52:07 -0800

> I guess we had our reasons.

How's png support at this point? It may not have been widely supported
when the decision to use GIFs was made. I advocate GIF/PNG over JPEG
for screenshots, because JPEG is a lossy format that tends to blur
hard edges, which you typically find lots of on screenshots. The file
size savings is quite nice, but the results tend to look a bit fuzzy.
Quantizing a GIF/PNG to a small palette like 6-bit can be reasonably
economical, after compressing the data.

I think I made these same suggestions many moons ago. PNG may be a
more viable choice now, though.
-- 
[email-masked]                            http://www.mikehan.com/
coffee achiever                              San Francisco, California
There is too much blood in my caffeine system
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