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#?ware:
It's visitware and guestbookware (not that I would TRY to charge for it
and crippleware would be pointless). :) This means that using these
scripts requires nothing more than visiting my homepage and signing my
guestbook at http://www.dryad.clara.net :) It would also be good if you
decided to follow my links about autism and AutiRing, but that's optional.
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Scenario (What is it ?).
We've all had this problem; you want to choose a background for your
Web-page, and you have hundreds to choose from. You need to test the
background first to see if it is seamless and looks good. What you you
do ?
Question. Do you:-
A). Write a simple page which does nothing but load a background,
changing the page source with a different background name every
time you want to view a different background ?
B). View the backgrounds using Visage/Multiview/etc, hoping and
praying that it will look good on the final page, since your
image viewer doesn't do tiling ?
C). Use Glen's amazing Backtest script which will display loads of
backgrounds on a single HTML page ?
Answer:
If you've ever done A or B, you'll DEFINITELY want to use C ! Once
you've tried C, you'll never even consider going back to A or B !!!
Backtest generates a page full of tables. Each table contains the Amiga
absolute path/filename of the background image in the table header, and
the actual background image in the table "body". The WIDTH="100%" tag
is used - so the resultant background image will be displayed as about
(screenwidth-20)*400. Eg, on my 720 pixels wide screen, the background
will be displayed in it's table as ~700*400. Almost enough to fill the
page area of my IBrowse screen.
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Usage.
SOURCEDIR/A
that's the only parameter this script takes. This is the directory in
which you have the background images you want to view. Backtest will
scan and write a file in that directory called Background_Test.HTML
I can't be bothered at the moment in working out how to put the
generated HTML document into another directory.
The script searches only for files matching the following:
#?.~(htm|html) - which is to say; anything but HTML files.
This is not strictly correct, since most peesee browsers don't like
Amiga IFF. I allowed all imagetypes for speed of viewing, and in case
you decide that it's not worth converting your #?.(br|pat|iff) to .GIF.
WARNING: With my particular setup, IBrowse crashes on .pat .br .ham8
.ham6 and .ham This is a nothing to do with the script and the page
it generates, but is an IBrowse or Datatype problem. If you want to use
these, convert them to gif or jpg. I'd advise using smoothing during the
conversion for 2 reasons:
1. Less flicker on interlaced screens.
2. MUCH smaller filesize (JPEG needs gradients and loads of colours to
be efficient, and smoothing will supply these).
In this current version of the script, YOU MUST SUPPLY A TRAILING / OR :
ON THE PARAMETER !!!!! There is no error checking for this, and there
won't be until a kind person out there (hint, hint) tells me how to
implement it.
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Configuration.
No real configuring to do (except maybe FBlit [see below]).
If you are displaying loads of images, you should use your browser's
memory image cache.
I would strongly advise you to enter your browser's config and reduce
the number of "network connections" to 1. Decoding 8 images at once
takes A LOT longer than decoding one image at a time. On my
68030/68882/68030/33MHz 32MB system, it took nearly 10 minutes to decode
and display a page of 188 backgrounds (this is why you will need some
tea/coffee).. Incidentally, it also used about 7.5MB of Fast-RAM to
display 188 of ~700*400*24 bit images in 8 planes.
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GFX Card/FBlit.
If you have a GFX card - lucky you. You can probably display 100's of
~700*400*24 bit images with no broblems.
If (like me) you have no GFX card, you'll probably want to use FBlit
to make IBrowse/Voyager/AWeb use fast-ram for image decoding (this
doesn't affect image display - not at all like MCP's memory patch).
Once you install FBlit, make sure that the relevant line(s) following
is/are installed in the "FAllocBitMap/list", and that "Task List
Options" is set to "Include":
V's Image Decoder Process (Voyager)
Ibrowse_Network (IBrowse)
AWebIP (AWeb
AWeb JFIF decoder AWeb
AWeb Gif decoder AWeb
AWeb Png decoder AWeb)
This will enable you to display loads of images in 256 colours.
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Don't forget to visit my homepage and use my guestbook (mandatory).
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