Q5.3.10: How can I get those oh-so-neat X-Face lines?

Firstly there is an ftp site which describes X-faces and has the associated tools mentioned below, at ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu:/pub/faces/.

Then the steps are

1. Create 48x48x1 bitmap with your favorite tool
2. Convert to "icon" format using one of xbm2ikon, pbmtoicon, etc., and then compile the face.

3. cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon |compface > file.face
   

4. Then be sure to quote things that are necessary for emacs strings:

   cat ./file.face | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g'
   | sed 's/\"/\\\"/g' > ./file.face.quoted
   

5. Then set up emacs to include the file as a mail header - there were a couple of suggestions here—either something like:

   (setq  mail-default-headers
          "X-Face:  Ugly looking text string here")
   

   Or, alternatively, as:

   (defun mail-insert-x-face ()
     (save-excursion
       (goto-char (point-min))
       (search-forward mail-header-separator)
       (beginning-of-line)
       (insert "X-Face:")
       (insert-file-contents "~/.face")))
   
   (add-hook 'mail-setup-hook 'mail-insert-x-face)
   

However, 2 things might be wrong:

Some versions of pbmtoicon produces some header lines that is not expected by the version of compface that I grabbed. So I found I had to include a tail +3 in the pipeline like this:

cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon | tail +3 |compface > file.face

Some people have also found that if one uses the (insert-file) method, one should NOT quote the face string using the sed script .

It might also be helpful to use Stig’s script (included in the compface distribution at XEmacs.org) to do the conversion.

Contributors for this item:

Paul Emsley, Ricardo Marek, Amir J. Katz, Glen McCort, Heinz Uphoff, Peter Arius, Paul Harrison, and Vegard Vesterheim