Faces
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One of the more fun features of exmh is its ability to display the
facesaver bitmap of the person that sent you mail.
There are two sources of the bitmap images:
the facesaver database or inline X-Face: mail header fields.
These two sources can be used independently, but the main trick
is getting exmh configured properly to use them.
The exmh installer asks for two pieces of facesaver-related information:
the root directory of your faces installation and a search
path of faces directories.
This assumes that you have retrieved the
faces software and associated databases and installed them under
one directory, which is referred to as its root directory.
The default is /usr/local/faces.
Underneath this directory there should be one or more
directories that contain facesaver databases.
These directories are named in the search path;
the names are relative to the root of the faces installation.
Typically there are facesaver, logos -- and a local database,
which is called parc at my site.
The first two databases come from the facesaver.tar.Z and
logos.tar.Z files, respectively.
The default values are:
Faces Root Directory: /usr/local/faces
Faces Search Path: parc logos news facesaver
If you are setting up your own database, you need to understand how
the database is organized.
It is easiest to demonstrate by example.
For myself, welch@parc.xerox.com, my facesaver image is found as
com/xerox/parc/welch/face.xbm.
exmh looks for this file under each of the directories named
by the faces search path.
The complete pathname might be
/usr/local/faces/parc/com/xerox/parc/welch/face.xbm.
If a bitmap is not found, then
the search algorithm trims off trailing components in an
effort to find a more general bitmap, typically a company or
organizational logo.
At your site, for example, you might only have
/usr/local/faces/logos/com/xerox/face.xbm, which contains the
Xerox corporate logo.
If your exmh installation is not correct, or if you have a personal
faces database that the exmh maintainer doesn't know about,
then you can also override the install-time settings with the
FACEPATH environment variable.
This is a more traditional search path of
colon-separated directory names.
For example, you could override the search path with this value
of FACEPATH:
/usr/mary/faces:/usr/local/faces/facesaver:/usr/local/faces/logos
The X-Face: header field
contains a compressed version of a facesaver bitmap,
which is a 48x48x1 (monochrome) bitmap.
The faces software comes with some filters and scripts to generate
these and decompress them.
The X-Face: field was designed as a way of distributing
your facesaver image so that folks can update their databases.
However, at the moment, exmh just decompresses the bitmap and
displays it.
It requires a Preference setting for the X-Face pipeline
for this to work.
If the pipeline is blank (the default), no processing
is done.
To decompress and display the field, use a pipeline setting like this:
uncompface | ikon2xbm
To create an X-Face: header field, use:
xbm2ikon myface.xbm | compface
The uncompface program comes with the faces software.
It also has a version of ikon2xbm, but a faster version of this
program (a C program instead of some scripts) is distributed with
exmh in its misc directory.
Future versions of exmh will cache the results of decompressing
the X-Face: line in a personal faces database, but in the current
version it just writes to the file /tmp/FACES.pid.
If you are inspired you could add a Hook_MsgDisplay
(Section Programming exmh) to stash this
file into a real facesaver database.
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