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From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Images & Icons (a modest proposal)
Message-ID: <8704140657.AA14434@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 14-Apr-87 01:57:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ingres.8704140657.AA14434
Posted: Tue Apr 14 01:57:43 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Apr-87 04:38:02 EST
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By now there are thousands upon thousands of digitized images, hand drawn
images, icons, and fonts available on BBS's, on shareware/freeware diskettes,
and sometimes posted to Usenet. The problem is that there are so very many
(often renamed in different places) that it's hard to tell what's going on.

Did you ever go through a whole disk of images, looking at each with showilbm
looking for one in particular that you won't know 'till you see it? Did you
ever see a BBS (like Amic here in Northern California) with so many *hundreds*
of pictures that it was infeasible to download them all? Wouldn't it be nice
if you could download something that would give you some idea of what a bunch
of them were like all at once?

Some people who create fonts will include with the fonts an image that shows
what the fonts look like; this is a very nice touch, and very convenient.
Along these same lines (as long as I'm on my soapbox), any program that allows
you to pick one of a number of fonts should ideally show the font itself in
the menu. Seeing is believing, but you may not remember what font is
represented by the names "emerald, usa, terminal, dotty, phoenix, klaxon" etc.

So I suggest the following: to any collection of images or fonts, always
add an index image which shows all of the collection on a screen, by
downsizing the images. It would be really handy to be able to see, say,
a four by four array of shrunk versions of the rest of the images, and you'd
get the basic idea of what's in them. There are a number of easy ways to
shrink images. The most widely available way is probably using Dpaint II
(grab picture as a brush, and do shift-resize), but with other tools there
are other ways. Eventually it'd be nice to have a program dedicated to
producing such a pictorial index, but meanwhile we can do it by hand.
	Doug Merritt          ucbvax!ingres!hatcher