Cover art for release

Authoring Inform 7
1

I have a piece of art for my story I want to enter in IFComp 26, but it doesn’t appear to show properly. The file is 960x960 pixels, named CoverArt.png, exactly like the docs say, but when it shows up in the browser, I get only the left-hand 2.5 inches showing, and enlarged to fill the entire page vertically.
Can anyone help with this?

2

I had to go into style.css and add this:

.coverimage img {
    width: 120px;
    height: 120px;
}
3

But the instructions say 960x960 pixels. Is it wrong?

4

I don’t know how or where to do that. I see no .css file in the release folder.

5

There should be 2 files: Cover Art (960x960), and Small Cover Art (120x120). I usually do ‘release along with cover art and an interpreter’.

My ‘materials’ folder looks like this:

image
image416×154 33.4 KB

And after I release, my release folder looks like this:

image
image713×239 10.1 KB

(that’s where my style.css is). This is for parchment. I just checked and my quixe game also has a style.css there

For the parchment one I wrote:
image
(I downloaded the parchment template from github)
and for the quixe one I wrote:
image

6

Surely there is a better way. Every time I Release, I would have to go into the style file and change it. Can’t inform perform a Release without all this?

7

Yeah, it seems like a big bug. I hope someone else has a solution, because I’ll use it!

8

I’m not sure, but my recollection is that the style.css file might get overwritten when you release. Once you have the style.css file the way you want it, you could change the file name so it won’t be overwritten. Or move it to another folder. Then, when you actually want to release the game to distribute to other people, you can change the file name back (or move the file back into the right folder) after you release it.

Or you could postpone including “release along with an interpreter” (or along with website) until you are ready to distribute the game.

(I don’t release a game that often while I’m working on it. Usually I just run it in the IDE.)

9

I believe the CSS template (as opposed to the released CSS) can be edited to avoid multiple interventions. I’ve done that for my projects. However, I use the ifsitegen.py script, so I can’t verify the usage in the IDE.

There are a few reports in Jira related to cover art.

10

Thanks all. I think my best solution for this small game is to not include any cover art.

11

Just adding a note to this thread that this is a known bug in Inform 7 and not fixed yet.

The docs say you can provide Cover.{jpg|png} and Small Cover.{jpg|png} files in the materials folder and these will be copied to the Release files. But releasing ignores Small Cover, instead it copies Cover as Small Cover.

I always manually copy my Small Cover.png file from materials to release every time I run the release procedure, which is annoying. Any short workaround amounts to the same thing – copying to or editing a released file – until the Inform 7 team fixes the bug.

Here is the issue in the Inform tracking system (Jira)

12

Charles,
Thanks for this. What should the dimensions (size) be for the Small Cover.png file?

13

I’d start by checking your release folder — see if both cover files actually got included. Sounds like Small Cover might not have made it in there, which would explain what you’re seeing.

14

Good tip. Thanks, I will.

15

I believe the smallest the small cover image should be is 120x120. Mine is 165x165 which was the largest size I found that still fit comfortably in the space allowed by the HTML template.