IMPORTANT NEWS!!
The successor to the Win32 IRC art app SLM Studio is called IRCPaint and is available to download at its own website. It's still free, and the source will be released eventually (when I stop being lazy - I need to write the documentation first). If you're just after a Windows-based tool for designing and editing IRC art, that is your best bet for the moment. (7 May 2008)
What are the SLM tools?
The SLM tools provide an easy and user-friendly way to create colourful IRC text banners/'art'. Currently the tools are available in powerful GUI versions for 32/64-Bit Windows developed by Crappy, plus several *nix and Web (Perl) versions developed by dgl.
Our aim is to write easy-to-use tools to allow ordinary IRC users create attractive, amusing (annoying?) text art. This is not classic ASCII art, but rather uses solid blocks of colour using the colour codes built into all modern IRC clients.
The original set of tools was created in 2001, but now (2006) the tools are being rewritten from scratch in order to add more features and create more efficient and less buggy code. but a new version, IRCPaint, has now been written and is currently being documented.
Why 'SLM'?
The SLM banner greeting has become a well-known part of the Blitzed IRC Network, and it is our aim to spread it further with these magnificent tools at our disposal. But how did it all come about? The answer is, nobody can be quite bothered to find out.
SLM seems to be a standard greeting between the most annoying Turkish/Arabic IRC users. While we are from the UK, we found the classic SLM banner the Turks were using (see top of this page) to be very amusing, and felt that it could be taken further. [As far as I can tell, since in the Arabic language there are no vowels, SLM is the standard way of writing 'salam' --taras].
The Tools
- SLM Studio 0.4.1 is the full-blown 'paint'-style editor. This is what started it all. Last version revised June 2002; superseded by IRCPaint in 2008. Screenshot
- SLM Studio (CGI version)(Download) is dg's web-based paint-style editor, written in Perl.
- PostSLM converts bitmap/JPG/GIF images into SLM art, with varying degrees of success. Screenshots: 1·2
- SLMSay is a version which creates text only, for integration with IRC clients. New version! (August 2007)
- OnTopic is a tool for creating 'fancy' topics. Includes full Korean Faces and Vertically-Striped Flags Of The World support. Screenshot.
Classic SLMs
We maintain a folder of classic SLMs for your delight. Last updated 23:32 27/06/2006