Re: [pic] Font

Lester5374 (les...@aol.com) wrote:
: Explanation of first line:
: flf2 - "magic number" for file identification
: a    - should always be `a', for now
: $    - the "hardblank" -- prints as a blank, but can't be smushed
: 5    - height of a character
: 5    - height of a character, not including descenders
: 60   - max line length (excluding comment lines) + a fudge factor
: 15   - default smushmode for this font
: 14   - number of comment lines

:      Now the 60 I'm still messing with (I don't know what it means!),
:  and I'd love to know what default smushmode means too. :)

I've recently studied the FIGLet source code quite thoroughly, with
the intention of some day (if I ever find the time) doing a rather
major rewrite with customizable smushmodes, restructuring to make
adding GUI code easier, and so on. This means I just may be able to
shed some light on the matter.

The max line length is in fact one of the parts of the code that
rather boggled me. It's an artifact of the way FIGLet reads the file,
loading each line into a buffer of a set size. If you have lines
longer than that, weird things may happen, so you are instructed to
add a "fudge factor" to the length.

The odd part is, FIGLet doesn't trust you, but adds 100 to the length
just to be sure. :) Not that you should rely on that, though, as
other programs such as FIGwin may or may not do it. Still, to me
there's something deeply ironic in the whole thing..

-- 
Ilmari Karonen (ilt...@sci.fi)
http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/