create ampsig schemes..

guidelines for scheme creators

This page aims to be a start-to-finish guide to creating your own ampsig schemes. As well as being especially useful to ampsig scheme creators, it should prove invaluable to anyone configuring any ampsig, whether you created it or not.

If you are hosting your ampsig with us, this page will help you understand better what all those checkboxes and things are, at least once someone gets around to coding them up ;o)

ampsig offers infinite variation and limitless possibility. When you understand all ampsig's settings, you can truly unleash the power of your sig, If you can imaginate in, it's probably doable.

get tooled up..

To create a scheme for ampsig you need only one thing.. a text editor. This is no trivial tool, and spending some time finding a text editor that matches your tastes and working style will be time well spent. Here are some quality text editors for Windows®..
On Mac OS X, I always liked BBEdit, but JEdit looks fine too (as well as almost every other platform on planet earth). So long as your editor can handle utf-8, and UNIX line breaks you'll be okay. PCheese tells me that SubEthaEdit is excellent, too, especially for collaborative projects, but I haven't tried it. It certainly looks cool.

Linux is totally stuffed with quality text editors, though we definitely feel that Kate and Kwrite (parts of the KDE Desktop) with their super cool code-folding and superb syntax highlighting deserve a special mention.

getting visual..

If you want to use your own custom background image, you'll need an imaging tool capable of outputting a PNG, preferably one capable of outputting PNG's with their alpha channel intact. On Windows® you are spoiled for choice, and as well as the major (read: expensive) imaging packages like Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady, etc, there are some cracking FREE and shareware imaging tools available.

For all-round image viewing, simple editing tasks, batch processing and a whole lot more, you could do a lot worse than the still-FREE irfanview. Billing itself as a "Viewer", irfan goes on to do a whole lot more, though its PNG support is limited to "single layer" transparency (like gifs).

For a nice page full of links to other "Image Convcerters" that can handle PNG's follow this link.

If you want a more fully-featured package, something that will compete with the like of Photoshop, but at a fraction of the price, you will definitely want to take a look at Paint Shop Pro, which just keeps on getting better and better with each release. Intuitive, innovative (just who had folding toolbars first???), feature-packed, robust, comprehensive, I could go on. Superb value-for-money.

Sadly Paint Shop Pro has now been bought over by Corel, so PSP10 will probably be bloatware crap.

On Mac OS X, as well as the major applications (which mostly started on the mac platform), you might want to check out GraphicConverter, a great-value shareware imaging tool capable of dealing with probably every image format ever invented.

I haven't edited graphics on Linux, but I'm fairly sure you'd find something suitable for your favourite Linux box, as well as tools for most of the other computing platforms, right here.

getting down to it..

The best way to create a new scheme, is to start with a copy of an old one. A "test.scheme" is provided in the ampsig distribution, it's special because it contains ALL the preferences that can be set (at least it's supposed to do that). Rename your new copied scheme file to "mytest.scheme" or whatever (it must have a .scheme extension) and open it in a decent text editor. If the whole lot appears on one line, then you'll need to upgrade your text editor (see above) because it can't handle the UNIX line breaks, and should be discarded immediately.

The test.scheme is also special because it won't show up in "random" schemes, it must be specified..

  http://mydomain/path/to/amp.php/test.png

The same is true of any scheme filename ending "test.scheme", such as "mytest.scheme", or "foo01_test.scheme", etc. This is handy if you are developing schemes on your live ampsig, and prevents your "in-progress" schemes appearing in your favourite forum.

Let's KISS..

The first important thing to remember is that you only need to specify preferences that you wish to override. Here's ampsig with NO preferences set..





..fairly basic, but looks okay. If you only wanted to have, say, a thicker border, then your new scheme only needs to contain that one preference.

The entire scheme file would look like this..

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If you create ampsig schemes and have any suggestions about ways to improve these guidelines, please feel free to let us know about them in the forum, and we'll try our best to incorporate your ideas into this very page.