duncan­lock­.net

Compressing Limited Colour PNG images

Most of the .PNG files on this site are the ‘blueprint’ style diagrams, like this one:

Blueprint style diagram showing an optical microscope. The sample inside is magnified in a bubble to 2500 times, showing it to be a complex, detailed paisley pattern.
Figure 1. This illustration is a large 5.6MB SVG file, mostly because of the very detailed paisley pattern that I used. Exported to PNG - and then compressed using the process below, you can get this down to 118.5kB.

I create these in Inkscape as vector .SVG files & export them to bitmap .PNG files. I then re-compress them, to ensure that the image files that are used on the live website are as small & quick to load as possible.

As these diagrams have a fairly limited colour palette, I can get lots of extra compression by reducing the colour depth of the final .PNG files from the default 32bit (millions of colours) to 8bit (256 colours) - without any …

Continue reading “How I compress PNG files on this website”

Thunar's icon

Thunar - XFCE & XUbuntu’s small but perfectly formed file manager - has a simple mechanism that allows you to easily add new commands to the right click menu of files and folders. These are called Custom Actions and are easy to create…​ here’s how to do it.

Click the Edit menu, then click ‘Configure custom actions…​‘. This will take you to the Custom Actions Manager, where you can create, edit or delete your custom actions.

You can enter anything into the command box, including complex bash scripts, names of scripts or executables on the PATH, or the full path and filename of the command you want to run.

thunar custom actions edit 1

On the ‘Appearance Conditions‘ tab, you tell Thunar when you want your item to appear in the right click menu:

thunar custom actions edit 3
Figure 1. Now, when I right click on a text file, I …
Continue reading “Useful Thunar Custom Actions”