

The grabber




=============================================
============ Commandline options ============
=============================================

The grabber accepts a few different commandline options:

   '-bpp'
      Sets the color depth, eg. -8, -16, -32.

   '-WxH'
      Sets the screen resolution, eg. -320x200, -1024x768
      
   '-windowed'
      Forces the grabber to start up in a window.

   '-fullscreen'
      Forces the grabber to start up in fullscreen mode.

   '-nosound'
      Disables audio output.

   '-pkey'
      Use 'key' as the datafile password.

   'filename.dat'
      Loads the named datafile.

===========================================
============ Using the grabber ============
===========================================

Various options can be set using the buttons and text fields at the top of 
the screen. You can edit the name of the datafile, the name of the header 
file for exporting object indexes (leave this blank if you don't want to 
output a header), and the prefix string for the header file definitions. You 
can change the grid settings for grabbing bitmaps, and alter the compression 
mode (see below). You can enable or disable backups: if this box is checked, 
the old version will be renamed to a .bak extension when datafiles are saved.
You can also turn dithering on (this can improve the image quality when you 
reduce graphics from 15, 16, 24 or 32-bit color to 8-bit color and from 24 or 
32-bit color to 15 or 16-bit color) and enable transparency preserving (this 
will ensure that the masked areas in bitmaps stay exactly the same through 
color conversion).

The contents of the datafile are listed in the box at the bottom left of the 
screen, and can be selected with the mouse or arrow keys. Multiple objects 
can be selected by holding down the shift or control keys while you click 
on the list or move the cursor. The selected object can be edited with 
commands from the Object menu, or using the shortcut menu produced by 
pressing Esc or right-clicking on an object. Double-clicking on an object 
performs a function which varies depending on the type of the object. 
Bitmaps are displayed full-screen (use the plus and minus keys to zoom in 
and out), samples and MIDI files are played, palettes are selected (meaning 
that they will be used when displaying and exporting bitmaps), and fonts can 
be edited by adding and removing specific character ranges.



===========================================
============ Modifying objects ============
===========================================

New objects can be created using the menus or by pressing Insert while the 
item list has the input focus. To make nested datafiles, create a FILE 
object (New/Datafile), and select it before inserting other objects.

To insert information into a datafile you must first create an object of the 
appropriate type, and then select the grab command (keyboard shortcut 
ctrl+G). For most objects this will bring up a file selector for you to 
select the file to read, but for graphic objects (bitmaps, RLE sprites, 
compiled sprites, and palettes) it will grab from the current contents of 
the image buffer, so you must previously have read a picture into this 
buffer with the File/Read Bitmap command (keyboard shortcut ctrl+G). You can 
use the mouse or arrow keys to select which portion of the image to grab. 
With the mouse, select the top left corner, click and hold the left mouse 
button, and move to the bottom right corner before releasing the button. 
Press the right mouse button to cancel. With the keyboard, use the arrow 
keys to select the top left corner, press Space or Enter, adjust the size 
with the arrow keys, and press Space or Enter again. By default the position 
will snap to a 16x16 grid, which can be adjusted by changing the values in 
the X-grid and Y-grid fields. Alternatively you can use the Box Grab 
command, in which case you should draw a bounding box in color #255 around 
your sprites, and can then just click once inside a box to grab the contents.

Note that palette data is not stored along with bitmap and sprite objects. 
To store the entire contents of a PCX or BMP file, you will need to create 
both bitmap and palette objects, and grab data into both of them. When you 
reload the datafile the bitmap will probably be displayed with the wrong 
palette. This can be corrected by double-clicking on the palette object, 
which will select its contents as the current palette, meaning that it will 
be used when displaying and exporting bitmaps.

The properties of the selected object are listed in the box to the right of 
the item list. These can be edited by double-clicking on one of the 
properties, and deleted by selecting one and pressing Del. You can insert 
new properties by pressing Insert while the property list has the input 
focus, or using the Object/Set Property command. Object names are stored as 
NAME properties, so the rename command is simply a shortcut for editing this 
property.



=========================================
============ Bitmap grabbing ============
=========================================

To simplify the process of grabbing several related images from a single 
bitmap (for example a set of frames which form an animation), you can use 
the File/Grab from Grid command. Like the normal bitmap grab command, this 
uses data from the image buffer, so you must read in a bitmap before you use 
it. You will then be able to adjust the grabbing parameters, enter a name 
for the new objects, and choose the type of object to create (bitmap, RLE 
sprite, or compiled sprite). Because several objects may be created, their 
names will be formed by adding a number to the end of the name you supply, 
for example if you enter "a_picture", the grabber will create the objects 
"a_picture000", "a_picture001", etc. There are two grabbing modes: using 
cutouts of color 255, and using a regular grid. The regular grid option 
simply divides the bitmap up into a set of equally sized tiles, using the 
specified grid size, and grabs each of these as a separate object. If you 
set the Skip Empties flag, the grabber will ignore tiles that don't contain 
any data (ie. those that are a single solid color). The color 255 option is 
more flexible. It expects the bitmap to contain information describing the 
position and size of each tile, in the form of a bounding box drawn in color 
255. The most reliable way to do this is to fill all the image except the 
parts you want with color 255, but the grabber should be able to understand 
more complicated layouts, even if you simply draw color 255 lines along the 
top and left edges of the area you want to be grabbed. For truecolor images 
where color 255 is not particularly meaningful, use a cyan bounding box 
(maximum blue and green, zero red), with a single yellow (maximum red and 
green, zero blue) pixel in the top left corner of the box.



=======================================
============ Configuration ============
=======================================

By default, the grabber will run in a 640x480 resolution, using the highest 
color depth possible on your graphics card. If you want to override this, 
you can specify an alternative color depth or resolution on the commandline, 
eg. "grabber -8" for a 256 color mode, "grabber -16" for 16 bit hicolor 
graphics, "grabber -320x200" to use VGA mode 13h, or "grabber 1024x768". 
Warning: editing datafiles that contain truecolor graphics is very slow in 
256 color video modes, and the grabber is not really usable in resolutions 
lower than 640x400.

You can configure the grabber to use external tools for editing data, by 
setting some variables in the [grabber] section of the allegro.cfg file. 
These are in the form "type=command", where the type is a four letter object 
ID, and the command is whatever program you want to be invoked to edit this 
kind of data. For these variables to be seen, the allegro.cfg file must 
either be in the same directory as the grabber executable, or in the 
directory pointed to by your ALLEGRO environment variable. To invoke this 
feature, select the Shell Edit command or press ctrl+Z. The grabber will try 
to invoke the tool on the original version of the file if it knows where you 
grabbed the data from in the first place, or otherwise it will write the 
object out into a temporary file prior to editing.



==========================================
============ Saving datafiles ============
==========================================

Datafiles can be saved using any of three compression types, selected from 
the list at the top right of the grabber screen, or with the '-c0', '-c1', 
and '-c2' options to dat. With type 0, the data is not compressed at all. 
Type 1 compresses each object individually, while type 2 uses global 
compression over the entire file. As a rule, global compression will give 
better results than per-object compression, but it should not be used if you 
intend to dynamically load specific objects with the load_datafile_object() 
function or "filename.dat#objectname" packfile syntax.

There are also three strip modes for saving datafiles, selected with the 
File/Save Stripped command in the grabber, or using the '-s0', '-s1', and 
'-s2' options to dat. With zero stripping, all object properties are written 
to the datafile, which is normally what you will want. With strip mode 1, 
properties specific to the grabber (the ones describing the origins and 
dates of each object) are removed, which will marginally reduce the file 
size, but will prevent the update command from working. For the smallest 
possible file sizes, strip mode 2 removes all properties, including object 
names and any custom properties you have added. This level of stripping 
should obviously be used with extreme caution, although in some cases it may 
be possible to recover the object names even after they have been stripped 
out of the datafile. If the grabber and dat utilities cannot find any name 
properties in a datafile, they will look for a header (.h) file with the 
same name, and attempt to parse this to recover the names. This is far from 
foolproof, and will not work for nested datafiles, but in some situations 
it allows the names to be read back from the index definition header. In 
addition to those three strip modes, you can define properties to be kept, 
whatever the strip mode. For example, if you want to strip all properties 
but the NAME, this command will do the job:


   dat -s2 -s-NAME file.dat


The objects of the datafile can be sorted alphabetically by name. This is 
selected by the Sort checkbox in the grabber, or by using the '-n0' and 
'-n1' options to dat. With zero sorting, objects are listed in the order
they were added to the datafile. With sort level 1, they are listed in 
alphabetical order according to their NAME property, including inside
nested datafiles.



============================================
============ Updating datafiles ============
============================================

Both the grabber and the dat utility have an update command, which scans 
through the datafile checking if any objects have changed, and replacing 
those which are out of date. This depends on the origin and date properties 
which were set when the data was grabbed in the first place, so it won't 
work if these properties have been stripped out of the file. This command 
can be very useful if you build a datafile containing hundreds of objects 
grabbed from external bitmaps, and later go back and change some of these 
bitmaps. Rather than having to figure out which objects are out of date and 
then manually re-grab all the affected data, the update command will 
automatically refresh the modified objects.



===============================
============ Fonts ============
===============================

Fonts can be read from GRX format .fnt files, 8x8 or 8x16 BIOS format .fnt 
files, and from bitmap images, or you can import a multiple-range Unicode 
font by writing a .txt script that specifies a number of different source 
files for each range of characters. The script file contains a number of 
lines in the format "filename start end", which specify the source file for 
that range of characters, the Unicode value of the first character in the 
range, and the end character in the range (optional, if left out, the entire 
input file will be grabbed). If the filename is replaced by a hyphen, more 
characters will be grabbed from the previous input file. For example, the 
script:


   ascii.fnt 0x20 0x7F
   - 0xA0 0xFF
   dingbats.fnt 0x1000


would import the first 96 characters from ascii.fnt as the range 0x20-0x7F, 
the next 96 characters from ascii.fnt as the range 0xA0-0xFF, and the entire 
contents of dingbats.fnt starting at Unicode position 0x1000.

When reading a font from a bitmap file, the size of each character is 
determined by the layout of the image, which should be a rectangular grid 
containing all the ASCII characters from space (32) up to the tilde (126), 
unless you are using the script mechanism described above, in which case the 
range(s) should match the one(s) specified in the .txt file. The spaces 
between each letter should be filled with color 255. If each character is 
sized exactly 8x8 or 8x16 the grabber will create a fixed size font, 
otherwise it will make a proportional font. Probably the easiest way 
to get to grips with how this works is to load up the demo.dat file and 
export the TITLE_FONT into a PCX file. Have a look at the resulting picture 
in your paint program: that is the format a font should be in...



=======================================
============ Alpha channel ============
=======================================

Bitmap and RLE sprites can store an alpha channel along with the color 
information, as long as they are in a 32 bit format. Alpha data can be read 
directly from 32 bit TGA files, or you can use the alpha channel commands 
(in the Object menu, or the right mouse button popup menu) to import a 
greyscale alpha image over the top of an existing object. This menu also 
contains options for viewing the alpha channel of the selected object, 
exporting the alpha data to a greyscale image file, and deleting the alpha 
data to leave only pure color information. You can also use the File menu to 
import an alpha channel over the top of a bitmap that you have loaded with 
the Read Bitmap command, after which the alpha information will be included 
when you next perform a Grab or Grab From Grid operation.



============================================
============ Datafile passwords ============
============================================

Datafiles can be encrypted with a password, by typing it into the 
"Password:" field in the grabber, or using the '-007 password' option to the 
dat utility. Passwords may be up to 256 characters in length, and are case 
sensitive. Encrypted files _cannot_ be read without the password, so please 
don't forget it and then come crying to me for help :-) To read an encrypted 
file into your program, call the packfile_password() function before 
load_datafile(). It is also a good idea to call packfile_password(NULL) 
afterwards, to set everything back to normal.




