This page is part of © FOTW Flags Of The World website
Instructions for GIFfers
Last modified: 2005-07-23 by antonio martins
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The instructions that follow (part of the
mailing list rules)
refer to the construction of GIFs, compiled
by Jan Oskar Engene, as of 4 January 2000.
See also:
- Images should be in GIF format, unless you have a good reason for it. A
good reason could be sending an untreated scan, which should preferably be
sent as a JPEG image file.
- Names of images should be at most eight characters long.
- Use the two first characters of the file name to identify the country by
using a digraph from ISO 3166 list of countries, and leave the third character
to the separator (see rule 4). Use the remaining five characters to give a
hint about the content. There is also a list for the sub-national entities of
many countries (ISO3166-2). Please try to adhere to this list too as much as
possible. If there is no ISO3166 code appropriate, use up to eight characters.
After the digraph representing the country, as 3rd character of the file
name, consider using a significant separator to give a hint of what kind of flag
is shown in the image. These are the separators used:
| symbol | meaning | symbol’s ISO 10494 code |
|---|
| - | sub-national territorial flags | 45 (hyphen-minus) |
|---|
| ~ | ensigns, flags used at sea | 126 (spacing tilde) |
|---|
| ^ | military flags | 94 (spacing circumflex) |
|---|
| ' | construction sheets | 39 (apostrophe-quote) |
|---|
| $ | commercial flags | 36 (dollar sign) |
|---|
| @ | sports flags | 64 (commercial at) |
|---|
| } | political flags | 125 (closing curly bracket) |
|---|
| ) | coats of arms | 41 (closing parenthesis) |
|---|
| ! | proposed or erroneous flags | 33 (exclamation mark) |
|---|
| _ | everything else | 95 (spacing underscore) |
|---|
- Please use FOTW standard colours
(see the FOTW Colour Guide for more information), unless a
specific shade is reported or prescribed. In that case please use the most
approximate Browser Safe Colour (RGB colours consisting of values 255, 204,
153, 102, 51 or 0), unless some other RGB value is reported or prescribed.
- The height of the images should preferably be 216 pixels, or as close
as possible.
- Images should only be as large as necessary to properly show the
details and the colours. Sticking to a palette of only 16 colours should be
enough for most flags, unless you use dithering to smooth pixel ragging —
for which a full 256 colour pallette is usually necessary. Use also 72 dpi
(standard screen scale) as the image definition, though many drawing
programmes do not allow you to change it.
- Do not send more than a total of 25 kb
in one day in at most 5 images.
If your images are larger than this, send them over more than one day to
the group. If your image is much larger than 25kB, you can also consider
sending it directly to FOTW web site Direc