The images in both the INF and HELP directory are always available
in both GIF and uncompressed OS/2 1.3 BMP format. The reason for
this is that HTML does not support BMP, and IPF does not support
GIF. :-(
HTML2IPF is very comfortable in this respect: it will
automatically convert all GIF images to BMP format every time it
finds an <IMG> tag, but only if no BMP file of the same filestem
was found (see HTML2IPF.INF
for details).
The image conversion program which HTML2IPF requires is specified
in line 20 of HTML2IPF.CMD
. The original had Image Alchemy in here,
I have changed it to "GBMSIZE", which is part of the freeware
"Generalized Bitmap Module" (GBM) package available at Hobbes.
HTML2IPF.INF
). That is, neither compressed bitmaps nor
Windows or OS/2 2.0 bitmaps work. This is annoying, because
IPFC's own image compression is totally outdated, but there's nothing we
can do about this.
I have used the following settings for the screenshots (just for your information, you don't have to use these):
Fonts used: Titlebars: Humanist 521, 13 points (available on the CorelDraw 4 CD in Type 1 format) All the other fonts are set to 9.WarpSans. CandyBarZ installed, colors: Active: top 191/0/0, bottom 52/0/0 Inactive: top 160/160/130, bottom 40/40/40 Oh yes, XWorkplace installed. ;-)Now, if you create your own screenshots, save them as GIFs with the exact filenames of the originals (e.g.
trunc.gif
); you must then
DELETE the respective BMP file, because HTML2IPF will only call the
image converter for BMP if no BMP file of the same name exists.
Tricks to reduce file sizes:
Keep in mind that HLP/INF files have their own compression scheme which works best when much redundant data is in the bitmap files. For those who know what that is: IPFC compresses using a modified Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm (similar to the GIF format). In plain English, large areas which have the same color can be compressed best.
This leads to the following recommendations: