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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 1295
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 28/11/2000
Subject: Preferred file formats: 1. DOCUMENTATION
[This message contains information which should
be included in the MM/JSW
FAQ.]
john_elliott_uk wrote:
>
> You lose points
for:
> * Misspelling my name.
So many people
spell it Elliot, which annoys me, let alone you.
;-)
> * Distributing documentation in MS Word format
-
> and a further black mark for saving it in such
a
> format that my copy of WordPerfect can't read
it.
I don't like documentation to be released in Word
format either, because
(a) Micro$oft is `not kosher',
and
(b) I have to go on a PC just to read it (I usually
use a Sun at university and a Mac at home), although
in the case of where's woody I was able to strip out
the text using a text editor. :-)
So what
formats should documentation be released in:
*
Standard ASCII text, with no funny newlines, so that
anyone can read it on any computer they can physically
get it onto. Special characters such as accents are
acceptable, but be aware that obscure accents such as h�ceks
(in Czech and Slovak) are not supported by the
`standard' ASCII character set (I made that particular
mistake in the JSW:LOTR documentation ;-) ).
* If
you want to include graphics in the documentation, my
suggestions would be:
- PostScript: can be sent
directly to a PostScript printer, or viewed using a
PostScript viewer, but not everyone has such
equipment;
- Portable Document Format (PDF): becoming a
standard, which in time should be universally viewable and
printable, but not yet;
- HTML: can be viewed and
printed by anyone with a browser (I guess), but tends to
be distributed on web pages rather than in .zip
archives (I have yet to print out the room descriptions
for Willy Comes Home, not all of which have been
written up ;-) ). It's also easier to slice the text out
of an HTML document if you don't have a browser
(simply remove the markup tags).
But please
include a plain text version as well, to guarantee that
everyone will be able to read the documentation - I can't
even use PostScript, PDF or HTML on my Mac, which may
be the only computer (other than my Spectrum ;-) ) I
have left when I leave university.
Recommended
graphics formats:
- JPEG/GIF: I'm no expert on
non-Spectrum graphics, but from what I've seen, JPEG tends to
be used for photographs and GIF for screenshots. GIF
achieves incredible compression, too. :-)
- PNG: A
format I've only come across twice: once on John
Elliott's site, the other a screenshot from Radzone (a
brilliant Amstrad CPC platform game, about which I posted
an article last Friday on
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/oldskoolplatformgames target=new>http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/oldskoolplatformgames> ). But my browser can view them, so that's okay
for me.
- SCR: a specialist 6912-byte SCREEN$
format for Spectrum emulators, which I can view using
MacSpectacle on my Mac (unlike JPEG and GIF), and which I can
convert to GIF using the C program scr2gif. So this would
be my favourite format for screenshots in a .zip
archive (as opposed to on a web
page).
--
Andrew
Broad
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/>
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/ target=new>http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/>
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