1 "Blorb" is a nonsense word from a popular early 1980s work of IF
2 called Enchanter where it was the name of a magic spell whose
3 purpose was to "safely protect a small object as though in a
4 strong box." In the late 1990s, the name was borrowed for a
5 standard format for what might be called the wrapping and
6 packaging of IF. A typical Blorb archive produced by Inform
7 contains the "story file" -- the actual program for the game --
8 together with its library card and cover art.
10 -- Graham Nelson in "Writing with Inform" (Chapter 23.4)
12 This program uses that cover art to generate thumbnail previews for
13 GNOME's file manager. I hope it will be useful to the devotee and the
16 DETAILS AND DEPENDENCIES
18 The command line utility "blorb-thumbnailer" uses the GDK-Pixbuf
19 library to load, scale, and save the cover in question. By itself,
20 this utility is of limited use, so it's accompanied by helper scripts
21 and format specifications that tell Nautilus (the file manager) how
22 and when to invoke it.
24 To compile, you'll need a few pieces of infrastructure that don't
25 normally come with GNOME: gcc, make, pkg-config, and the GTK+
26 development headers. Translated for Debian or Ubuntu:
28 $ sudo apt-get build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
35 The second line installs the program and the manual; registers the
36 Blorb MIME type; and checks the appropriate keys into the GConf
37 settings database. (And if it doesn't take effect immediately, logging
38 out and in again is one way to force the issue.) To remove,
39 unregister, and delete:
45 GPLv3+ (see COPYING or <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>).
47 With one exception: the xdg-mime utility, which is released under an
48 X11-style license; see "scripts/xdg-mime" for more information.
50 ISSUES AND LIMITATIONS
52 * There's no generic "blorb" icon to represent files without covers.
54 * URIs aren't supported. In theory you could be browsing, say, the IF
55 Archive, via FTP, in Nautilus, and it would attempt to provide
56 thumbnails. For now I'd say, use IFDB instead.
58 * Although the "blorb-thumbnailer" utility is intended to be called
59 by and from Nautilus, there's nothing to prevent it being used
60 manually as the situation requires. In its current form, however,
61 it accepts no options (not even --help or --version) and prints no
66 main.c main routine: option parsing and file handling
67 main.h common definitions
68 minblorb.c blorb-specific functions
69 thumb-gdk.c image handling
70 scripts/mass-thumbnailer test script
71 scripts/xdg-mime mimetype installation
72 blorb-thumbnailer.1 manual
73 blorb-thumbnailer.desktop thumbnailer description for XFCE
74 blorb-thumbnailer.schemas gconf registry keys for Nautilus
75 blorb.xml mimetype definition for application/x-blorb
76 COPYING version 3 of the GNU GPL
77 Makefile instructions for compilation, installation
81 Lewis Gentry <8uuuuu@gmail.com>
82 http://lg.vblank.net/blorb/