[2/4] tools: enable .lnk thumbnailing in Gnome

[Scott Ritchie]

On 07/28/2010 12:36 AM, Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
>> >
> freedesktop.org has a spec for a shared thumbnail cache
> (http://triq.net/~jens/thumbnail-spec/index.html), but no accepted
> spec for a file browser to request that a file be thumbnailed: there's
> a draft DBUS thumbnailing spec that's been heavily discussed last year
> but it still isn't ready or adopted by any/most desktops
> (http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec).
> 
> I was thinking that what we could do, is when we generate a .lnk file
> on the desktop, we also write a thumbnail for it to the shared
> thumbnail cache - that way the desktop environment doesn't need to ask
> us to generate a thumbnail since it already exists. But then the cache
> could be cleared out periodically meaning we'd eventually lose the
> thumbnail. Winemenubuilder could work around this by regenerating all
> thumbnails that are missing on every startup. But even if this is
> acceptable solution, it's still hard to implement, because the
> thumbnail cache spec requires specific thumbnail sizes (128x128 or
> 256x256) and a special pixel format (256 colour indexed-mode PNG IIRC)
> which means we'd need to resize and colour convert the icon(s), and it
> needs special PNG comments on the thumbnails which windowscodecs
> doesn't support even on Windows AFAIK. So is this idea viable?
> 

That spec will need to be updated.  Gnome recently started supporting
thumbnails that are smaller than the overly large 128x128 (actually I
think it was 96x96 originally).  gnome-exe-thumbnailer now relies on
this behavior to render properly, in the past when it was forced to
large sizes it looked incredibly ugly.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie