This mail contains an edited plucerrc, a colormap for ppmquant, a command line to test your color and a URL to ACID TEST your palm's color power, and some ranting!
I am using a Visor prism with Plucker 1.1.13 installed on a pretty clean (i.e. just as mandrake made me) mandrake 8 box with a 2.4.4 kernel. I had to do alot of rpm -ivh --force[s] to get the varios image libraries, tools, utilites and etc to work. I wish I could have built some of these tools and etc. from source, but many of them are only located in rpms at the various rpmfind mirrors. So I was forced into the hell-world of rpm dependencies. I did do several rpm --nodeps installs too. I wish I had documented my install more thoroughly but I hope that the little info below will help someone. 1. Colormap for ppmquant ------------------------ If anyone is looking for an 8 bit colormap for ppmquant, I've found one: http://www.webreference.com/dev/graphics/art/216col.gif 2. Sample of my edited .pluckerrc ---------------------------------- I got my color to work perfectly using the following entries in my ~/.pluckerrc (rcfile abbreviated for clarity with [...]): <EDITED RC EXAMPLE> [...] verbosity = 2 ;;good to see what is going on [...] bpp = 8 ;;let's go for 256 colors! ;;even though our colormap only contains 216 =( [...] ;;maxwidth = 150 ;;maxheight = 250 ;;can't figure out what these do. . .I don't need em =) [...] ;; Name (and maybe path) for the image tools: ;;ppmquant_program = ppmquant ppmtoTbmp_program = pnmtopalm ;;pnmscale_program = pnmscale ;;pnmfile_program = pnmfile ;;giftopnm_program = giftopnm ;;djpeg_program = djpeg ;;pngtopnm_program = pngtopnm ;;convert_program = convert ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;NOTE BENE: I know that I am using ppmquant and djpeg and giftopnm ;;without uncommenting these rc lines. . . Hmmmmmm. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Name (and maybe path) for the color maps used by ;; ppmquant: ;; ;;palm1bit_graymap_file = palmgray1.map ;;palm2bit_graymap_file = palmgray2.map ;;palm4bit_graymap_file = palmgray4.map palm8bit_stdcolormap_file = /home/earl/plucker/216col.PPM ;;palmcolor8.map ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;palm8bit_stdcolormap_file is the location of the ;;lil netscape color pallate. too bad we only get ;;216 colors =( ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; </EDITED RC EXAMPLE> 3. Command line ---------------- I run plucker using the following commandline: ./plucker-build -f colorcheck2 --bpp 8 -M2 -H http://news.bbc.co.uk This goes out and fetches the bbc site images and all to a depth of 2 (i.e. -M2). And puts it in a file called colorcheck2. VERY COOL!!!!!!! 4. Acid Test ;-) ------------------ This webpage has 256 gif swatches of a 256 color pallate. I had no problem sucking it down, parsing it, syncing it and viewing. Wow. WAY COOL! The final file compressed down to like 32K! http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/stuff2a/complete_websafe_216/test.html ./plucker-build -f colorcheck2 --bpp 2 -M2 -H http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/37/stuff2a/complete_websafe_216/test.html 5. ppmquant and colormaps ------------------------- ppmquant "normalizes" images and reduces their number of colors by mapping them to a colormap. My install of netpbm-progs-9.18-1 for i686 which includes ppmquant didn't include the necessary colormap files. The man page of ppmquant contains a colormap in ascii format: P3 8 1 255 0 0 0 255 0 0 0 255 0 0 0 255 255 255 0 255 0 255 0 255 255 255 255 255 You can save this in file and name it ascii8.PPM. If you can open it with the gimp, then it is a vaild colormap for ppmquant. The trouble is that it's only a 8 color file. But you will get some color. I've got a bigfoot.PNG that looked pretty k-wel. Is that a man in a suit or a . . . poorly mapped PNG file?!!! 6. Conclusions: --------------- Plucker is very cool. The documentation is outdated and confusing. The plucker-build program seems at times precarioulsy duct-taped together. Like Mir, though, it gets the job done and done well! Gawd help us if a fire breaks out though. There are default behaviors that are not well documented. Why does my djpeg convert jpegs so nicely even though it's commented out in the rc!? The rc is confusing. Why all the different formats for command line switches? Some switches seem to overlap functionality. The special plucker:URL syntax is confusing as hell. . . Marketing-wise, plucker needs to hone its language on just exactly what this app does, how many pieces make up the app, and how the heck you use it. Plucker could dominate the market for palm viewing of web content if the parts could come together a little tighter. But the effort put in is more than worth what you get out. Thanks to everyone on the plucker-dev team. I've been waiting for this solution for Years! Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------- Random phrase: Gersho purged davis
