[Clipart] Thumbnails in clipart packages

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com> writes:

>> 2.  Inside the zipfile, everything should be inside a single
>>     directory called clipart
>
> Perhaps it may be wise to follow the tar convention and have the
> internal directory be the root of the zipfile name.  I.e.
>
> foobar.tar  -> foobar/
> foobar.zip  -> foobar/

Of course, if someone renames the zipfile then you'll get surprised
when you unzip it...

> It could be quite distressing to unzip a collection of clipart zipfiles
> in a dir, to find all of them writing into the same directory.

True.

> To broaden the applicability of this file format, perhaps we could refer
> to it as a 'Zipped Image Library' - 'zil'?

I'd find it very surprising if the extension 'zil' weren't already
taken.  For one thing, there's a programming language called that.
(Or was it the compiler?  Whatever.)  For another, zil is a common
idiom for nothing.

> What I'm thinking about is guiding this towards another idea I'm
> working on for Inkscape - Symbol Library Extensions - a feature for
> Inkscape to allow installing collections of SVG for direct use
> inside Inkscape (through a browser).  Since this could be useful for
> kinds of SVG items beyond clipart, it would be appropriate to use a
> more generalized name.

The name doesn't matter to me very much.  JAR stands for "Java
ARchive", after all, and it's used for more things than Java.

Hmmm...  okay, this archive format might be used for clipart, for
other images, for sound clips, ...

We could call it Media Collection Jar, MCJ, if that isn't taken.  Or
Zipped Collection Bag, ZCB.  Just thinking out loud here.

>> Unless someone can think of a reason to do it differently, how about
>> we just agree that clipart/.thumbnails within the zip archive contains
>> things that would go in ~/.thumbnails when the package is installed on
>> a desktop system.  That leaves the location hashing...
>
> I could live with this, although having hidden directories within a
> zipfile feels sort of wrong.  

So don't set the hidden attribute, then ;-)

In all seriousness, it could be clipart/thumbnails without bothering
me at all.  In fact, that might be preferable, since very old versions
of pkunzip can't unzip filenames starting with a period.  (Version
2.50 of pkzip fixed this, aeons ago, but 2.04G was intensely popular
for a long time and may still be floating around in some corners of
the internet.)  And in any event software that is aware of the package
format will unpack the thumbnails into ~/.thumbnails or
MYDOCU~1\.thumbnails or some comparable location. redoing the location
hash for the filename in accordance with the TMS.

-- 
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,"ten.thgirb\@badanoj$/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/