Ovation

Have you seen http://www.mw-software.com/software/ps3/ps3.html ?

Yes, I’m aware of that – and it is infinitely better than anything I was planning (for instance, I wasn’t even going to attempt to sort out the utter balls-up that happens when you attempt to print a Sprite).

However… at the very least the standard PostScript driver should be able to output non-English (and Western European) characters. While my specific area of interest is (far) Eastwards, it is part and parcel of the same problem when character sets that have been a part of RISC OS since the early ’90s are equally not [fully|correctly] supported.

Example: *Alphabet Latin4.

Then create a test document such as this (I’m using Ovation):

(click here if that is too small to see comfortably)

Throw it at PrintPDF. Then note that pretty much all of the accents have vanished in the final PDF document. Adobe Reader on Android manages the s and z with carons (upside down circumflex), but that’s about it. This isn’t freaky Chinese characters, this is… I dunno, Turkish? At any rate, it’s been a lurking part of RISC OS since 3.10 at least.

Are we, in the modern global era, going to be stuck with typographical capabilities to rival Windows 3.1?

An “unofficial” release of Ovation for those interested, which adds the following:

• When holding Select to move a frame grab handle, you can use the cursors to nudge a frame into position. It does this my moving the pointer (so it moves slowly). Hold Alt as well to move more rapidly.
• Adjust-click on the icon bar to open the New Dialogue dialogue (instead of just creating a new blank document like Select-click does).

To install, make a backup copy of your !RunImageS file, then download this one and drop it into your copy of Ovation. Rename it (it should be !RunImageS) and set the filetype to &FF8.

NOTE #1: You are downloading the live build directly from my Pi, so it is likely to be slow or not work at all depending on atmospheric conditions and how the WiFi is feeling.

NOTE #2: As it’s the live source, you can also pick up the mods if you’re feeling adventurous and know where to look. Off the top of my head, you’ll want box, drag, main, and mym. Nothing else has changed.

NOTE #3: I’m posting this as I don’t want to waste time turning on the “big PC” to update my website. So depending on what I do and whether anybody sends me suggestions, the proper release version 1.54 may or may not be the same as this build. Don’t consider this as in any way “official”.

I’ve also included a document listing the keypresses, or at least, the ones I’ve found: http://heyrick.ddns.net/ovation/keypresses.cdd (filename “keypresses”, filetype &CDD)

Have fun!

The “unofficial” version was downloaded by a user from:

• Google Inc (!)
• TalkTalk / Carphone Warehouse
• O2
• PlusNet
• Eclipse
• KPN Internet (Holland)

(yay to the WiFi for not pooping out!)

Everybody fetched the updated !RunImageS file.
The first and last also fetched the keypresses document.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? ;-)

My Pi will be off this afternoon. I’m going out and there are thunderstorms in the area.

I’m Google Inc. I’m always on line :)

And I’m PlusNet. I fetched the keypresses document too. I am a bit to the northeast, and the thunderstorms have not reached here yet.

And I’m PlusNet. I fetched the keypresses document too.

Yup, I see you. About 10h49 this morning. Uh, that’ll be 9h49 your time. ;-) I missed that earlier as there were about two minutes in between your fetches and in the intervening time, a load of entries for stuff like /CFIDE/administrator/, /manifest.json, several different capitalisations of phpMyAdmin and something that WebJames logs as oflaoflaofla. ;-)

Server is back on, for now. Now that all the plants have had a really good watering and the sky scared the crap out of the cat…

<aldershot>When I was little my mother would tell me that the thunder was just the gods rearranging their furniture</aldershot>

Version 1.55RM now available.

• Cursor key for frame positioning (as described above)
• Support for 256 colour sprites with 256 colour palettes (as mentioned in the TransGIF thread)
• Support for frame colours appearing correctly in 64K/16M colour modes
• Keypress help document now included alongside Ovation

http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20160723

Thanks Rick for your work – some ideas :-)

When you drop a sprite onto the main window – instead of a error msg – what about Ovation just generating a frame with the sprite inside.

Adjust resizing of a sprite frame – resizing of the sprite as well.

I wonder if it is possible to make a ‘!Trans_kindle’ for loading ebooks.
Are there any decoders out there?

As a extra – are there any exact 32bit safe examples of ‘callback’ / ‘vector’ code?

One info said – save all regs – does that mean – r0 – r14??

I wonder if it is possible to make a ‘!Trans_kindle’ for loading ebooks.
Are there any decoders out there?

Interesting question. Once you get past the variety of e-book formats, a quick query suggests the format is basically a XHTML /CSS mix and the wonderful addition of DRM to spice things up.

Sourceforge has a handful of obvious one, with cool reader being GPL2 and the Eclipse add-on DEP4E being EUPL

Mind you anyone doing this for RO would probably want to study the existing Ovation transloaders and the file format information to avoid any “cross contamination” from GPL. i.e ideas and concepts are fine for study but code is not.

Rather lost track of what Ovation Pro has that Ovation does not so I may be thinking of capabilities beyond the original Ovation.

When you drop a sprite onto the main window – instead of a error msg – what about Ovation just generating a frame with the sprite inside.

That’s not really how DTP works. ;-)

Adjust resizing of a sprite frame – resizing of the sprite as well.

Ditto above; but I wonder if a keypress for “Fit to frame” mightn’t be an idea.

I wonder if it is possible to make a ‘!Trans_kindle’ for loading ebooks.
Are there any decoders out there?

Given the hoops I had to jump through to get Calibre to strip the DRM from Kindle books, it isn’t something I’m going to go near.

That said, epub books are basically a reduced subset of XHTML which is rather strict (my Pocketbook e-reader gave up rendering on an <br>, it needed to be <br /> – so the parser won’t have to cope with the same sort of weirdness as, say, a browser would.

One info said – save all regs – does that mean – r0 – r14??

Maybe. Your code needs to enter, so it’s stuff, then return with everything the exact same state. If you only use R0-R3, then you only need restore those. But note also if SWIs you call corrupt other registers.
Think of a CallAfter routine as a cat burgler – in and out leaving no trace…

That’s not really how DTP works. ;-)

But that is the way Impression works (and I think Acorn DTP) and many RISC OS users won’t have used anything else! I never used any Windows or Mac DTPs but it wouldn’t surprise me if they accepted drag and drop to a default frame. Though my RISC OS background may be giving me false expectations.

Oh and !Draw.

That’s not really how DTP works. ;-)

Can’t really agree with that, Rick :) On the Mac/PC, InDesign allows you to drag an image on to a page, and it’ll create a frame around it if none exists or you’ve dropped it onto a blank area. Also, it’ll allow you to resize graphics while dragging a frame’s handles dynamically (if you hold down Command/Ctrl while doing it, IIRC). Although implementing the latter requires a bit of thought – you’d ideally want a way to constrain the image’s proportions too. InDesign does it by holding Shift down – I think the RISC OS convention is Ctrl.

Mmm, I was referring more to DTP on Acorn than other systems that are loads more advanced. ;-)
I still think it is better to place the frame and then insert the image, doing it otherwise runs into complications with frames and subframes and such (remember how Ovation does frames…).

Okay. I still believe that DTP is more a “design page” then “insert content”. This is how AcornDTP worked, although it took it far too literally (you couldn’t type in a text frame, you had to associate pre-prepared stories). While it is a lot easier to type into text frames (especially for making corrections), I feel that auto-creating image frames is too much like trying to be a word processor.

That said, it seemed like an interesting thing – to figure out Ovation’s code enough to hook some code into the image loader to notice that the destination frame is not a picture frame, and to create a new picture frame for the image.

This has now been done, if you hold the right Alt key when dragging in an image. At the moment, it is extremely braindead, it will create a frame 100mm square at the upper left of the frame to where the image is dragged. It will clip to the frame if the parent is smaller. If you drag multiple images, frames will be created for each – probably on top of each other. And all the same size.

Note that this only really works for sprite, JPEG, and (untested) Draw/ArtWorks. It will not (and probably cannot) work for foreign formats via TransLoaders, as that is handled differently.

As it is, it’s a start. Now we can have self-creating image frames, it is a simple enough matter to drag them around and resize them.

Therefore, if you are interested in playing with this, you can pick it up from my Pi’s server: http://heyrick.ddns.net/ovation/!RunImageS
It’ll be okay to download this tonight, I’m not going to be working on it any more as I have downloaded some episodes of Our House – hey, it’s the girl from Marumo now a teenager – same haircut though!

It’s a shame that imgur no longer seems to provide smaller sized “thumbnail” images. I got up earlier than normal this morning in order to put together a stew. Yeah, I know, middle of bloody summer and I felt like a beef stew. Anyway, it’s been sitting on the PC from 9am this morning until 9pm (now). A good long slow cook. Feel free to make disparaging Pentium jokes. ;-) https://i.imgur.com/36p1mcQr.jpg

Remember – the image auto-frame is not (yet) standard behaviour. You have to hold the right Alt key to make it happen. And you need the !RunImageS from my server, obviously. ;-)

A good long slow cook. Feel free to make disparaging Pentium jokes. ;-) https://i.imgur.com/36p1mcQr.jpg

You realise of course that with that kind of proximity if anything goes wrong it will wreck your slow cooker :)

That’s okay, I have a backup cooker. Did you notice what was plugged into the desk lamp? It’s an LED bulb with an absurdly big heatsink, and it is absurdly bright. Like something you’d expect to see PhotonicInduction “pop”. ;-)

To give you an idea, ambient light in my room is 12 lux according to my phone. No, I don’t like bright, my eyes are rather photosensitive.

Holding my phone about 30cm (a foot) from the normal desk lamp (a 40W oven bulb, I like tungsten tonality, not these naff halogen bulbs), my phone says the light is 3100 lux.

Underneath the LED bulb, same distance, the phone’s sensor jumps up to 24K lux.

Rick it sounds like you don’t need to plug the slower cooker in. Just turn the LED lamp on! I can feel a bit of radiated heat from my 1.2K Lux bike light and it get hot to touch, 24K must be interesting! How many amps?

The bulb claims 12V 7W. The lamp base (houses a transformer), used to driving a 20W projector bulb, doesn’t even feel warm when running this light.

Sounds like a nice bike light. I’m kind of glad that technology has given us better/safer options than stuff like a dynamo powered filament bulb, that barely lit up the road ahead and the damn thing turned off at road junctions and such when you stopped…and kind of need to be illuminated the most. I’m glad my eyes are pretty good in the dark, when I used to cycle around Bridgwater (circa 1993), once I was off-road I’d turn the lights off. For all the good they were, I’d see better using the light from the town reflected in the clouds. Or, on the not-so-many days it was visible, the moonlight.

I swear the moon is getting brighter. I can read a book by the light of the full moon. Uh… the end of “In The After”. I tried it just a few days ago. Can’t remember it being that bright when I was young… or would living in France instead of Hampshire make a difference? That much closer to the moon, or something? :-P

I swear the moon is getting brighter. I can read a book by the light of the full moon.

I’ve not noticed any change in brilliance but despite older eyes and reports that light pollution etc. is reducing visibility I see more details on the moon than I recall seeing when I was young. It could be my memory is failing or I didn’t really look at the detail when young!

I swear the moon is getting brighter. I can read a book by the light of the full moon. Uh… the end of “In The After”. I tried it just a few days ago. Can’t remember it being that bright when I was young… or would living in France instead of Hampshire make a difference? That much closer to the moon, or something? :-P

Probably the regular rain washing the particulates etc out of the atmosphere.
Hell, even the air round Dunkirk is probably clean despite all those coastal pollution sources that normally make the air orange. Makes London air look clean.

How difficult was/is it to implement – the use of the TRANSxxx utilities?
Having them work with !Draw and !Paint would be handy.

I see that !Vector offers a conversion to GIF to JPEG as a option – instead of Sprite – not sure it uses the !TRANSloaders though.

Seems to require ‘CompressJEG’ – is that util/module available?

Is there a 100% option for JPEG?

How difficult was/is it to implement – the use of the TRANSxxx utilities?
Having them work with !Draw and !Paint would be handy.

Ovation → c.trans

From memory, it looked like it starts the server and does some wimp messages – somewhere along the way there appears to be a service call…

Seems to require ‘CompressJEG’ – is that util/module available?

CompressJPEG? it’s mentioned in the 2nd news article down on the front page