X-Face: Page 2 - Usenapp

X-Face

Sara

I'd love to get my old x-face back into my postings. I can't see where to put it though - can anyone give me some guidance here?

Sara

Sara - ignore me, I've just found it!

Boffin

Sara I'd still like to be able to see incoming ones, though!

Sara

Boffin Oh yes, me too, but I can wait until it's ready.

Alan_B

Any progress on adding the feature to view x-faces. It's not particularly important to me but it would be nice to see it working some time. Thanks.

Boffin

Alan_B I would like to see this too. Perhaps it's just too difficult?

Andre

X-Face comes from the stone age and unfortunately there is hardly any information about it. Hence it all takes a little longer.

I'm trying my best.

Bernd

Andre X-Face comes from the stone age

Just like Usenet :-)

Andre

Bernd Andre X-Face comes from the stone age

Just like Usenet :-)

Indeed, but usenet is still current while X-Face is not.

Boffin

I'm not sure that I follow what you mean by "not current". They appear on enough Usenet postings to suggest otherwise - I have one, for example. Admittedly, they are not much use and never were; still, a little frivolity never did anyone any harm.

Boffin

I had a look and the only thing of use I could find was open source code. So I dropped a line to Thorsten Lemke, author of GraphicConverter, because X-Face is one of formats GC can encode and decode, saying "The only thing I can find is source code at http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/compface/, and it may be that the only information on how to decode and display an X-Face is buried in this code (which I confess means nothing to me)?"
His reply was "yes, just use that code as base for understanding the encoding".
So, in essence, I think it means that unless you can understand and use/translate/transcribe that code, we've had it.
But you probably knew that already ☹️

Alan_B

Boffin Thanks for the research. It looks like we may be out of luck then 🙁 However, I won't be losing any sleep over it 🙂

Andre

Boffin I've looked at compface's source before, but haven't been able to do much with it. I'll check again.

Bernd

I understand that it´s hard to code if you can´t find any sources.
On this page there is some newer code (Python) that looks much more understandable than the code on sourceforge.
http://m-einfalt.de/xface_index.php
Also found this:
http://www.dairiki.org/xface/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face

Boffin

I had a look at http://m-einfalt.de/xface_index.php and yes, it looks much more comprehensible. I don't know in which language it is written, but it looks sufficiently similar to algol/coral66/pascal for me to have attempted to disentangle it - if only I were 20 years younger!
Also, it looks self-contained, with all the data tables supplied.
I suspect that it would be much easier to write code to display an X-Face than to encode a picture, but of course I may be wrong in that…

Alan_B

Boffin I don't know of any Usenet clients that actually encode x-faces from an image. I've always used either online tools or graphical manipulation apps such as GraphicConverter to produce an x-face file whose contents can then be imported into the client. Incidentally I notice that Hogwasher displays x-faces, as does the much missed MACSoup.

Boffin

No, i don't think any news app would ever create an X-Face from an image - quite out of its remit. I've always used GraphicConverter, the advantage of which is that the user can see the quality of the X-Face produced. Sometimes what you think will be a good image turns out rubbish!
NewsTap on my iPad also displays X-Faces.

Andre

No worries. Usenapp will support X-Face soon.

Boffin

When is soon? A Year, perhaps? When is the next update planned?

Andre

Contrary to my earlier post, the X-Face feature is not supported. Maybe in the distant future, but not for now.

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