Ascgen dotNET » colour

Next version: Globalization + Save and Print Colour Images

Jonathan — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:04:39 +0000

Just as a heads-up, the next version of the program will include the ability to translate it into whatever language you want (or change words to make them sound rude).

Originally I planned to use the inbuilt globalization stuff, but it’s unbelievable how complex it makes everything. Instead I’ve come up with my own easy system that piggybacks on the existing resource class and loads the strings from an external xml file.

The current full list of translation strings is here:
http://ascgen2.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/ascgen2/ascgen2/translation.xml

You can use any or all of these by translating the strings inside the tags.

It will also finally come with saving to colour image files, and printing in colour. Which was much harder then the translation stuff.

I’m not sure whether to have the version number as 0.8.3 or 0.9.0. Maybe 0.8.5?

Plus, I’ve changed http://www.jmsoftware.co.uk/ into a blog so I can start posting more off topic stuff without cluttering this one up, and I hope to start posting regularly soon. It also hosts a few random little programs.

Beta 7.0 Released – COLOR OUTPUT

Jonathan — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 17:35:41 +0000

Download it here

Changes in this version:
Added “Save as Colour Text” to output as html and rtf files with the Color information added
Added menu links to the report a bug and feature request pages
Changed batch conversion form from contextmenus to contextmenustrips
Added saving as html files

Now don’t say I don’t do anything for you people.

What the

Jonathan — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:05:42 +0000

Either sourceforge’s stats are messed up, or the program was downloaded 10,068 times yesterday (up from the usual ~150 a day). Since it says that only 2838 people have downloaded the latest exe, I think it’s a bug.

No promises, but I’ve just read an article on colouring richtextbox text that I might be able to adapt for a certain oft-requested feature. I tried something very similar using the same method, and it looks like I gave up just before I found the answer. If it updates with a good speed everything else is easy; we’ll see…

Image to Color/Colour ASCII Art Conversions

Jonathan — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 01:06:00 +0000

2006 is try the stuff people keep bugging me about year. So… I was getting nowhere speeding up the variable width conversions, and decided to have a go at colouring the output.

Good news: Easy to do, and creating the array of Colors is fast.
Bad news: Displaying it in a Rich textbox is really slow. It’s looping through the text, selecting each character and setting the SelectionColor and it’s so slow you can see it work on each character.

The output is also not particularly great. The whole reason the normal black and white conversions work is that each character represents a grayscale value. In a colour conversion, every character needs to represent a solid pixel and then be coloured to the Color value. Basically the ramp, brightness/contrast and levels of the output image do not matter.
Even if this gets sorted out, I think this is something that I won’t be able to implement until I’ve written a control to replace the textbox, and that’s going to be difficult. The save as an image code will also need to be totally rewritten.

In other news, I really want to add some extra content about the program to this website (features, manual, output gallery etc), so I’m thinking about moving from this blog into a CMS. I’m also trying out some google adverts for a few weeks to see if they can help pay for the site. It sucks, but that donation button was just wasting space.