Copyright (c) 2007 Bart Massey

I do a lot of web site maintenance, and everybody these days expects to see a "favicon": the little custom icon that appears left of the URL in the address bar and bookmarks of most browsers. Favicons are loaded by the browser automatically, preferably by referencing a LINK REL element in the HEAD of the document being accessed. Older browsers expect to see [Windows Icon Files](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO_(icon_image_file_format), so it is probably best to supply those. But of course, this is a pain in the neck, especially in my Linux environment.

I have written a shell script to munge an arbitrary image in PNG (easily adaptable to most any other standard format) into a workable favicon. The script makes heavy use of utilities from the Netpbm collection. It takes a source image file as its argument, and makes a giant mess in the directory it is run in, including a favicon file that contains the image at a multiple of resolutions. The formats in the favicon are currently hard-coded to a recommendation from the ppmtowinicon manual page, but the script should be easily adaptable to include other formats. I left the garbage around because sometimes one wants to hand-edit it; the --prescaled flag will make the script use validly-named files that are already present rather than generating them itself.

This program is licensed under "GPL version 3 or later". Please see the file COPYING in this distribution for license terms.