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.