FAQ 5-8

Question 5.8

Sometimes I see little images at the top of article buffer. What’s that and how can I send one with my postings, too?

Answer

Those images are called X-Faces. They are 48*48 pixel b/w pictures, encoded in a header line. If you want to include one in your posts, you’ve got to convert some image to a X-Face. So fire up some image manipulation program (say Gimp), open the image you want to include, cut out the relevant part, reduce color depth to 1 bit, resize to 48*48 and save as bitmap. Now you should get the compface package from this site. and create the actual X-face by saying

cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon | compface > file.face
cat file.face | sed 's/["\\]/\\&/g' > file.face.quoted

If you can’t use compface, there’s an online X-face converter at http://www.dairiki.org/xface/. If you use MS Windows, you could also use the WinFace program, which used to be available from ‘http://www.xs4all.nl/~walterln/winface/’. Now you only have to tell Gnus to include the X-face in your postings by saying

(setq message-default-headers
        (with-temp-buffer
          (insert "X-Face: ")
          (insert-file-contents "~/.xface")
          (buffer-string)))

in ~/.gnus.el. If you use Gnus 5.10, you can simply add an entry

(x-face-file "~/.xface")

to gnus-posting-styles.