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The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field


This is the secret page maintained by the webmaster to record details of the website specs--especially how to create the graphics. All done with Paint Shop Pro.

TO CREATE COLORED PAGE/FRONT COVER TITLES:

Each graphic is 210 by 40 pixels, white background. Add text, anti-aliased, with font Aero, style bold, size 22. Coordinate the font (foreground) color with the color to be used on the appropriate page. Set the text in the image so the left edge is at 5 and the bottom edge at 35 (i.e., set 5 pixels in from the lower-left corner).

Then add a drop shadow in some suitable color, centered (so it creates a blur or glow around the letters, not a shadow as such), with opacity set to 100 and blur to 20, or thereabouts. Save as gif file, e.g. about.gif.

TO CREATE TOP OF PAGE MENU BAR:

590 by 20 pixels, text is 'Arial', style bold, 8 point. The colored frame appears automatically because the menubar is a link, and in the img tag, border is set to =1.

THE LITTLE SPACESHIPS:

The source was the spaceship in the logo on the front cover of the magazine. This was captured in a separate image (the surrounding letters and stars airbrushed away), which was then resized, shrunk in one direction, to 'square' the shape, correcting for the oblique angle of the original; then rotated 90 degrees and flipped upright, and saved as shipright.tif

To make a new little ship, open shipright.tif, color-fill it as desired, then resample it down to a 50 pixel width (23 pixel height), and save it as as gif, e.g. ship7.gif. (See bottom of this page.)

TO CREATE LOCUS COVER IMAGES:

These are gif files 200 by 261 pixels.
Scan whole cover in at millions of colors, scaled 80%, to result in a file just over a megabyte big.
Save as a 'tif' file. Then resample the file down to width 200.
If necessary crop or extend length to 261 so all cover images are uniform 200x261.
Save as gif file (not jpg) file, e.g. cov9704.gif, in the covers subdirectory.
(If necessary scan in at higher scale, e.g. Feb 97 issue with thin oval white line becomes jagged at 50% scan.)
For the smaller 'thumbnail' images, just sample down to width 100; save as e.g. th9704.gif.

TO CREATE FRONTPAGE COVER LOGO:

This is a very high resolution scan, 200% or a bit less, so the image comes out 1200 pixels wide (it will be resampled to exactly 600 pixels wide); the scanned file is about 1 megabyte big.

A series of scans was taken until getting, by trial and error, one that was even all the way across (examine the edges of the letters along the top and bottom). The best scanned image was saved as logocov.tif in locusgraphics directory.

Then the background was flood filled to solid red=255. The black lettering was airbrushed out. Then this was resampled down to 600 pixel width and saved as logocov.gif.

TO CREATE SMALL LETTERS-ONLY LOGO:

The idea is to capture the white-letters only--without the black shadow--and then manipulate them separately.

Start with logocov.tif; crop to remove 'newspaper of'; color-flood solid red background; color replace to solid-white letters. Then airbrush out the black lettering and the sunburst. Color-replace the red background for the off-black shadow color (so the drop shadow disappears into the background). Make whole image negative--black letters on white. Then retouch any slightly rough edges. Save this as locus.tif.

TO MAKE INDIVIDUAL SHADOWED LOCUS LOGOS:

Start with locus.tif. Do color-replace to change all black to all red. Use magic wand to select all the letters (all areas of same color), then use image/drop shadow (set to?) to create the drop shadow. Resample down to width 300, and save as gif file, e.g. locredsh.gif. Finally, trim away all white space around image to make it as compact as possible.

(These are: ship1..ship2..ship3..ship4..ship5..ship6..ship7..ship8)