Images and Screenshots

The images in both the INF and HELP directory are in GIF format. Unfortunately, HTML does not support the OS/2 BMP format, and ipfc does not support GIF.

So the makefiles in INF and HELP automatically convert all GIF images to BMP format, if required. This requires gbmsize.exe to be on your PATH (see "Requirements")

If you do not want to use gbmsize, you can convert all the GIFs to BMPs manually, e.g. using PMView. Be careful though: IPFC only supports uncompressed OS/2 1.3 bitmaps. 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 This is annoying, because IPFC's own image compression is totally outdated, but there's nothing we can do about this.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'd be very grateful if you could create your own screenshots for the online documentation to reflect your language.

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:

Do not take screenshots of folders with background bitmaps. There will be practically no compression on those.
Use as few colors as possible. You can use PMView to reduce the number of colors to, say, 12 colors, which usually still looks alright.
When converting images, make sure you don't have "dithering" or "error diffusion" enabled, because this will add lots of extra pixels which will make compression less efficient.
Also, if you need to scale images to a smaller size, make sure not to enable any "interpolation", i.e. introducing extra pixels to make colors smoother. This adds lots more colors to the file, which cannot be compressed well either.