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Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 16:03:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: papowell@astart.com
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To: doc@freebsd.org, nik@freebsd.org, papowell@astart.com
Subject: Re: Images in the documentation
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> >     and figuring out ways to update illustrations
> >     which used screen dumps.
>
> How do you mean?
>
> >     Discovered that there were no way to automate the screen dumps
> >     easily,  hired a trained monkey to document how to update the
> >     illustrations and then had them do the illustrations (remember to
> >     put Prozac in trained monkey's Orange Juice BEFORE you tell him that you
> >     changed the title on the screen for all 30 of the screen dumps you
> >     use).
>
> Screen dumps aren't going to be that much hassle for us, I suspect.  Partly
> because we're not going to use a great deal of them (certainly not in the
> early days anyway), and partly because they're so easy to generate on 
> FreeBSD.  As for standards, that just requires a chapter in the Primer,
> which I, or someone else, will have to write.  We'll need a common look 
> for X screenshots (same window manager, colour scheme, that sort of thing)
> and maximum image widths that we want, but that's about it.  Certainly for
> a volunteer project anyway.
>
> > I hate the idea of Yet Another Graphics Descrition Language and Tool.
>
> New output format does not imply new tools.  As I say, the commercial
> packages are gaining support for it, and Sketch can import EPS and write
> SVG, so people can go on using the same EPS generating tools they always
> have been.  The eps-converted-to-svg probably won't be as easy to 
> manipulate programmatically as something that was generated in an SVG
> aware tool, which is unfortunate, but there's no much we can do about
> that.

Yes, I am aware of this.  But it is Yet Another PITA.

>
> > The only way that I see that this would be better is if there was a way to
> > leverage this:
> > 
> >   a)  Make it easier to automate the process of getting illustrations.
> >       (Screen Dumps!  Hatums Screen Dumps!  Bad!  Evil!  Cause you cannot
> >       modify text easily.  
>
> For text mode screen dumps you can -- they'll be a 4000 byte dump of the
> screen memory, where each pair of a bytes is the ASCII code and the colour
> code respectively.  Editing these after they've been produced is relatively
> simple.

Yes, I agree on this,  I forgot that most of the setup stuff is 'text screendumps'.
The ones we were using were Xterm screendumps,  actually 'Xterm window' dumps.

>
> For those wondering why we'd do screendumps in text mode -- I want to 
> preseve the colours and general look and feel.  A non-graphic version of
> the text can still be included (and will be, and probably be automatically
> generated), but the colour version gives a bit more impact, looks more
> professional, and probably communicates more to the reader as well.
>
> For graphics dumps (shots of X windows, that sort of thing) this will be
> a problem.  Fortunately, we won't have many of these to contend with, I
> think.
>  

I just had a sudden thought:  What happened to the project/tool
that allow you to do playback of X sessions?  I remember reading
about (Freshmeat?)  but I can't find it in my archives and a simple
minded search of Freshmeat did not turn it up.

This might be the solution to the problem of screendumps.

Patrick Powell                 Astart Technologies,
papowell@astart.com            9475 Chesapeake Drive, Suite D,
Network and System             San Diego, CA 92123
  Consulting                   858-874-6543 FAX 858-279-8424 
LPRng - Print Spooler (http://www.astart.com)


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