What does this software do then ? ================================= aview is an high quality ascii-art image(pnm) browser and animation(fli/flc) player usefull especially with lynx browser. Supports: dos (VGA + MDA), stdio, curses, slang, X11, gpm, linux-console Features ======== o High quality ascii art rendering o Portable o Save into many formats (html, text, ansi, more/less etc...) o Contrast, Bright, Gamma control o Image zooming/unzooming o Three dithering modes o Hidden "bonus" features :) o Inversion o Support for bright, dim, inverse attributes/extended character set What is PNM file format? ======================== PNM if an graphics format similiar to GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and others. Aview uses it because of its simplicity. Many free or shareware conversion tools from other graphics format exist (ImageMagick, NetPBM for UNIX, alchemy for DOS and others.) So you should use aview to browse images in many graphics format. UNIX version has script that does conversion automatically (using eighter NetPBM (preffered way) or ImageMagic conversion program. FIFO is used to do not waste your disc space so conversion is fully transparent. Under DOS and other operating systems you probably need to do it yourself. Usage ===== UNIX: asciiview [filenames] [options] to browse any image format supported by NetPBM or ImageMagick. Use OTHERS way if you don't have installed these tools options should be listed using aview or aaflip program when used w/o parameters OTHERS: aview [options] [filename] To browse pbm pgm ppm or pnm image. aaflip [options] [filename] to browse fli or flc animation Once aview is started use 'H' for help about keys. How this all started ==================== Once upon a time we've (my friend Kamil and I) bought two old Herculeses as secondary monitors. We didn't know for that time that our Diamond Stealths 64 cards would become obsolete soon. The next day we downloaded the logo of Linux Texas Users Group - nice silly penguin looking like a cowboy! It was so exciting logo ... we decided that we couldn't live without it and we wanted to see it at boot time as a logo on our secondary monitors. There was a small problem - Hercules doesn't support color graphics. So we decided to convert the penguin image to ascii art using netpbm tools. The output was very ugly because the converting algorithm was absolutly stupid. During the night I designed a new convertor that used a font bitmap to creat an aproximation table. The output wasn't very good since the algorithm wasn't tuned so well. Many months this small piece of code was waiting on my disc for the day "D". Meanwhile I started a new project XaoS (a fractal zoomer) with my friend Thomas. And then I got an idea: Ascii Art Mandelbrots! I was really impressed by the result! XaoS was faster, portable and looking much better than ever before. I found a new way to go ... AA-Project ========== dT8 8Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb Three goals of AA-Project: 1. Port all important software (like Doom, Second Reality, X windows etc..) on AA-lib. 2. Port AA-lib on all available platforms (mainly ZX-Spectrum and Sharp). 3. Force IBM to start manufacturing MDA cards again. AA-project was started by Jan Hubicka. In that times just a few people knew about it. Then a new demo named BB has been relased to show the power of AA-lib technology. Now the project is freely available and anyone can help. Where to find Aview =================== All programs covered under AA-project can be obtained at `http://aa-project.sourceforge.net'.