AA-lib driver
The AA driver is currently the most advanced and portable driver
for XaoS. It is based on AAlib--a high quality ASCII-art library
developed by the AA-project. (see
http://aa-project.sf.net)
It is a fully featured XaoS driver for text mode displays. It
supports 256 colors and the mouse where possible.
It also has some extended features available from the UI
menu:
- Attributes
- AA-lib may use character attributes to improve image quality.
By default it uses normal, dim and bold characters where possible,
but you can also enable different attributes like reversed or bold
font characters. You may also enable usage of non ansii/reversed
characters if your device supports it.
- Font
- AA-lib uses a bitmap image of the font to prepare the
approximation table used for ASCII art rendering. This bitmap is
expected to be same as the one used by your device. AAlib performs
detection where possible however some devices (like UNIX text
terminals or MDA) do not support this. AAlib has few font images
compiled in, so in this case you should try to use one of them to
achieve best results.
- Inversion
- Some devices use inverse video: use this to get correct results
on such devices.
- Dithering mode
- Dithering is an way to get more exact color in approximations,
by combining more characters; but this method can produce ugly
looking noise on certain images. Use this menu to disable or tune
it.
- Palette options
- By default AA driver uses the XaoS palette to render images,
but it quite often looks ugly on text displays. Here you can choose
a special text palette instead. Note that with filters enabled, the
results may be rather ugly. This function is available from the
palette menu.
- Save text screen
- The normal save function will generate a PNG image instead of
nice ASCII-art. To save ASCII art use this function instead. It
supports many text file formats like HTML, ANSI, more, etc... It
will also ask you for font and attributes(see above). It is
available from the file menu.
The AA-lib driver also provides the full set of standard
AA-lib's command line options. You may use them to tune parameters
like gamma correction, and so on. See xaos -help or
the AA-lib documentation for details.
The AA driver was written by Jan Hubicka, 1997.