README for gensig 1.0 22 November 2002 What is gensig? --------------- Thanks for trying gensig. Gensig is a dynamic email signature generator for Evolution 1.2 or any other email client that supports dynamic signatures via scripts. If your client does not support scripts as signatures, it may also be possible to fake dynamic signatures with cron. Gensig was designed and developed for Linux boxes and Ximian Evolution 1.2. Other Unix-like operating systems should work as well. Gensig will probably not run on Windows operating systems however if anyone wants to see if they can get it to work with Microsoft Outlook I will gladly accept a patch. Requirements ------------ Gensig requires the following components: * Linux or other Unix-like operating system * Ximian Evolution 1.2 or similiar email client For information about obtaining Evolution, www.ximian.com * Python interpreter. Gensig has been tested with Python version 2.2.2. Other versions of Python may or may not work. For information about Python, www.python.org Installing gensig ----------------- Installation is simple. Go to a command prompt, cd over to the directory you downloaded the gensig tar file to and type: gunzip -c gensig-1.0.tar.gz | tar xv mv gensig-1.0 ~/.gensig Then, within Evolution, go to Tools->Settings->Composer Preferences->Signatures and click on "Add Script" Give it a name such as "gensig". Click on the Browse button and then select the $HOME/.gensig/gensig-default file. Then click on the "Add Signature" button. Once you have added the signature, you may associate it with a particular account by selecting "Mail Accounts" in the Settings window. You will be able to specify a default signature for each email account you have. In addition you can switch on or off the gensig signature from the compose window when you are composing an email message. Customizing gensig ------------------ This is an advanced topic. If you do not feel comfortable with file structures, etc. then this is not for you. You can create your own unique profiles for gensig. When the gensig.py script is run it looks for one argument specifiying the directory containing a gensig profile. The default directory is "default" under ~/.gensig. A gensig profile directory consists of three items: a file named "name", an executable named "fortune" and a directory called "pixmaps". These items are described as: name: This is the text that is inserted in the second column in your signature. You would typically put your name and email address there. It can contain plain text or HTML. If you use plain text make sure that it is HTML-safe (i.e. "<" for the "<" symbol, etc. pixmaps: This contains images that gensig will select randomly for the first column of the signature. It must contain at least one browser-viewable image file. If you do not want an image in your signature, it is suggested that you simply put a single 1x1 transparent .gif in the pixmaps directory. Typical file types would be PNG, JPEG, and GIF (even animated) files. These images should be relatively small. The suggested size is no larger than 48x48 pixels. fortune: This should be an executable. Gensig run this executable and use its standard output as the text in the third column of your signature. It is called "fortune" after the Unix fortune program. The easiest thing to do would be to simply create a symbolic link to the Unix fortune program, but you can customize it to whatever you want. Gensig expects the standard output of the program to be plain text, and will format it for HTML accordingly. Now that you have created your profile (directory) with the three necessary items, you will need to create a shell script to call gensig. See the gensig-default file as an example. Basically you call gensig.py with one argument, being the full path to the directory containing your profile. For example if your profile was called marduk, you'd create a shell script called gensig-marduk that simply runs gensig.py with $HOME/.gensig/marduk as a parameter. Currently Evolution does not allow you to pass an argument to your signature scripts, so this is a work-around for that. Contact ------- If you have any suggestions, bug reports, patches, etc for gensig, you may email me at marduk@python.net. Perhaps if there is demand we could start a depository of gensig profiles (themes if you will).