Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§25.8. Cover art
Accompanying files are not the only things which can be included in a "release along with" sentence: for instance, we could
Release along with cover art ("A stone gargoyle"), a file of "Collegio magazine" called "Collegio.pdf" and a file of "The mating call of the green wyvern" called "Mating Wyverns.mp3".
Cover art can not only be used to advertise a work of IF, it is also displayed to players by certain interpreters, such as Zoom or Spatterlight for OS X, or Windows Frotz for Windows. It is also used on the IFDB (ifdb.org), and by browsing applications. If Zoom is installed, then on Mac OS X Leopard, the Finder shows cover art directly:
Cover art for a work should be prepared in either JPEG (".jpg") or PNG (".png") format, and we recommend that it should be square, like a music album cover. Programs which notice the cover art for a work of IF are likely to scale this up or down as convenient for their own display purposes, but it would be helpful to provide the original art at 960 by 960 resolution. The cover art must not be smaller than 120 pixels in either dimension.
To provide cover art, we should create an image file called Cover.jpg, or else Cover.png, and place it in the project's .materials folder. For instance, we might have:
Works in Progress
Magician.inform
Magician.materials
Collegio.pdf
Cover.jpg
Mating Wyverns.mp3
(supposing that, as in the previous examples, "Collegio.pdf" and "Mating Wyverns.mp3" are the filenames of two feelies that accompany the release).
The text in brackets after the release instruction...
...is provided for the benefit of blind or partially sighted users, and should be brief.
