Thorsten Wilms: Backtestground 0.2

I’m happy to announce that I finally wrestled my way through actually making a release with a tarball and a PPA of my extended and improved Backtestground collection of templates and command line tools for designing and evaluating wallpapers

There are even man pages now, created from docbook xml sources!

UPDATE January 17: Fixed an issue with PPA and tarball that led to incomplete installations (Now it’s actually 0.3)
Ubuntu 10.10 PPA
Tarball

extract-background-context

Expects one screenshot with white, and one with shadow-color (usually black), background as input. Puts out a PNG image with transparent desktop. This is useful for evaluating wallpapers that should go well with panels
and themes other than the one you are currently using.

to-common-resolutions

Expects an image as input and crops/resizes it to several common screen resolutions. The resolutions are now specified in a configuration file.

context-to-common-resolutions

Expects an image with transparent background, that may contain panels, icons and windows (like extract-background-context produces) and crop/resizes it to several common screen resolutions, while doing something hopefully sensible with the content.

combine-per-resolution

Combine pairs of images of matching resolution. Expects 2 paths, either to a single image file, or a directory containing images. Each image found at, or within, the first path will be combined with all images of matching resolution found at, or within, the second path. The first path will be used for the lower layer, the second path for the upper layer, when compositing.

GIMP XCF and Inkscape SVG templates

These are not included in the package, as it’s not possible to install files to the user’s Templates folder that way. The setup script in the tarball does install them, if there is a Templates folder.

• GIMP XCF background template
• Inkscape SVG background template

Both have a 2560 x 1600 pixel canvas to use the largest commonly offered resolution, currently. Passepartout layers allow to see how things will look when this space is cropped to conform to other common aspect ratios.

This simulates the effect the Style: Zoom setting in Appearance Preferences: Background will have: the image is scaled up or down such that it fills the screen without distorting it. If the aspect ratio of the image is wider than that of the screen, it will be scaled to the same height and the areas on the side will be cropped. If the aspect ratio of the image is taller than that of the screen, it will be scaled to the same width and the areas on top and bottom will be cropped.

For Ubuntu and Gnome users: Putting them into your Templates folder makes them available in Nautilus or on the desktop by right-click, Create Document.

The Inkscape SVG file supports batch export to 14 screen resolutions.

Howto:

• Bring up the Layers panel (Keyboard shortcut: Shift-Ctrl-L)
• lock all but the targets layer
• Select all in the targets layer (Ctrl-A)
• Bring up the Export Bitmap dialog (Shift-Ctrl-E)
• Check Batch export 14 selected objects
• Hit Export

This will create 14 files with names like size_1024x0768.png in the same folder as the opened file. The size_ part is an easy target for a search-and-replace on the SVG file, if you want a specific prefix or target path.

You might want to remove the rectangles in the targets layer matching unwanted resolutions. Repeatedly Alt-clicking allows to cycle through stacked objects in Inkscape (your window manager might be configured to intercept Alt-clicks, though).