a program to generate animations

Hi, 
We have posted a PC program to help create ASCII animations...
Originaly writen in spanish, it has now an English version.

if you are interested, it can be downloaded from

http://members.xoom.com/albertopsq/analia.zip

The zip file is 161K, the program runs under Windows 95.
It does no require any installation, just unzip it in any subdirectory and
run it.
No DLLs, added to your windows directory :-)
The zip file includes a sample animation file.

Comments and suggestions about what can be added to the program are welcome.

There are also some animations at
http://members.xoom.com/albertopsq/


A brief introduction to what the program does...

ASCII graphics, can be converted to animations, to view with Netscape,
Explorer and Opera.
Some of ANALIA's constructions, are optimized to use Netscape extensions to
HTML
and are not compatible with Explorer or Opera.

The graphics are animated using a JavaScript program.
ANALIA can build to different type of pages, one using Forms and the other
using
Layers.
Layers are only supported by Netscape 4.0 and above.

ANALIA, generates an HTML file, with the same name of the source TXT file,
containing the necessary JavaScript code, and the modified ASCII source.

The HTML file can be edited with the Composer or any HTML editor, to add
titles,  backgrounds, colors, etc.

ANALIA requires two type of information to create the animations:

1) Information that is included in the TXT source file.
2) Information entered on ANALIA's main dialog.

1) ANALIA's source file format. 

Animations are composed by frames of ASCII drawings.

<P> indicates the beginning of an animation frame. 
<E> indicates a new background, (optional)
<F> indicates the last animation frame. 

Backgrounds: the frames that start with <E> are used as backgrounds for the
animation. The figures in the regular frames, appear always in foreground.
It is possible to intercalate more than one background.
ANALIA uses the last background found, for the following frames.

No other special format is required.


2)ANALIA's main dialog. 

Delay between frames: Is the number of milliseconds, in-between frame
updates. 
The actual resolution on a Windows machine is 50 ms.

Lines per frame: is the number of lines to be used as one frame.

ANALIA starts each frame, on the line following a <P> indicator.
If the number of lines between two <P> indicators is less that the one
entered
on the dialog, an error message is generated, and the HTML file is not
written.

The same error message is generated, if the <F> indicator, is missing from
the
file.

Lines pass the number indicated, are discarded and can be used for comments,
or separators.

ANALIA uses the longest line in the graph to calculate the number of rows,
for
the textarea generated in the HTML file.
If desired, the horizontal adjustment can be used to offset this value.

Left margin: ANALIA will ignore the first n characters of each line.
This can be used to help in  the design of the graph, by using line numbers,
starting at each <P>. For example, a template for drawing ASCII animations,
can be written as:

<P>ABCDEFGHIJ 
01| 
02| 
03| 
<P>ABCDEFGHIJ 
01| 
02| 
03| 
To easily identify the position in each frame.

Final pause: If this is selected, a longer pause is programmed after the
last
frame, before the animation is played again.
For some animations, is better to repeat continuously, without a longer
pause.


Tables: If selected, the animation window is framed with an HTML Table.

Layer: If selected, ANALIA uses a script that plays the animation as the
contents
of a layer.
In this way, colors and backgrounds can be used.
ANALIA defaults to yellow on black,  this can be changed by manually editing
the
variable "formato" in the HTML file.
Layers are only supported by Netscape 4.0 and above.

HTML page title: ANALIA writes the the string enter here, as a header on the
HTML
file.

Background music file: If a file is selected, ANALIA places an <EMBED Tag to
play
the music file.
This has only been tested with Netscape, Explorer might require a different
syntax.

ANALIA (is the English version of ANA, spanish), is in the public domain and
can be
copied and distributed without limitations.