Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick

This documents how to turn a plain-text book into an animated 88×31 “button” GIF using ImageMagick on a POSIX system. It argues that tiny, deeply constrained displays can still carry long works, so the project uses a tiny bitmap-like font (TomThumb, ~6×4 with spacing) because standard fonts need ~10 px height to be legible. Given an 88×31 canvas and that font, the layout fits five rows of 22 characters; text must therefore be pre-wrapped and cleaned. The write-up notes that GIFs have effectively no practical frame-count limit and that animation can run for hours, so the approach is feasible even for Moby-Dick.

The how-to covers the whole pipeline: obtain and trim a plain-text copy, collapse newlines and wrap to 22 columns using cat, tr and fold, sanitize multibyte characters with sed/grep, and optionally insert chapter breaks. Render frames by piping the wrapped text into ImageMagick’s convert with -page, -background, -font tom.ttf and -pointsize 6, then crop off extra margin (-crop 88x31+0+0), set frame delay (-set delay 600) and coalesce. A small Python helper centers lines by prefixing spaces. Examples include a first-chapter GIF and a full-book result (about 4.2 MB and roughly 19 hours long).