Designing a WebCard bitmap the hard way
NoteCards link icons leading to cards of a certain type can and typically do have a custom bitmap associated with the type.
WebCard cards of type Web initially inherited the bitmap of the parent type Text, a stylized NoteCards blank card frame. To visually differentiate links to Web cards I added a new bitmap, here open in the bitmap editor of Medley Interlisp:
The bitmap at its actual size of 21x18 pixels is near the top left corner of the window. It represents a blank card frame with at the center a globe crossed by meridians and parallels, a common symbol of web links.
Aside from some misunderstandings on defining Interlisp bitmaps, adding a bitmap to WebCard was easy.
Once designed and defined the bitmap itself I passed it as the value of the LinkIconAttachedBitMap property along wiht the other arguments of NCP.CreateCardType, the NoteCards API function that defines new card types.
The hard part was coming up with a suitable bitmap, which kept me busy on and off for a couple of weeks.
As an artistically clueless geek my original plan was to pick a public domain icon, scale it to the required size, and import it in Medley Interlisp. Although this Lisp environment predates most modern image file formats, Andrew Sengul wrote a Lisp tool that can convert from PBM to the native Interlisp bitmap format.
I soon found a nice globe icon. Then I was unwillingly thrown into a rabbit hole of NetPBM, Gimp, and ImageMagick tools and options, struggling to produce the right format Andrew's tool could process.
I learned the hard way that if an image contains only black and white pixels, and no other colors, it's unnecessarily difficult to obtain a black and white, 1-bit depth file. Most tools save to 8-bit grayscale despite claiming to do 1-bit black and white.
When I finally imported the rescaled, converted PNG into Medley I realized it was an unlegible tiny blob.
Link icon bitmaps have a size of 21x18 pixels and, aside from the stylized card that makes up the frame of the bitmap, the usable area is only a dozen pixels across. In desperation I fired up the Medley Interlisp bitmap editor and designed the bitmap myself from scratch. It took just a few minutes and was unexpectedly easy.
I'm pleased with the result, but stunned at how long such a seemingly simple task dragged me.
Discuss... Email | Reply @amoroso@fosstodon.org