AKFAvatar - News
AKFAvatar 0.19.0
Item posted by Andreas K. Förster <akf> on Fri 22 Oct 2010 03:07:51 PM UTC.
AKFAvatar 0.19.0
The most important improvement this version brings is support for the Lua programming language. Lua was chosen, because it is very, very small and can be bundled with the binary packages. Lua is also very easy to learn. Although the documentation of it is admittedly not very good for beginners, yet. There is a complete reference of the AKFAvatar-specific functions, but no tutorial. However, users who know another programming language already should not have any problems to learn Lua-AKFAvatar.
But the Lua-support is not only interesting for programmers. There are already quite some ready to use Lua programs and modules. Look for example at the script "fs-quiz-en.lua". There are some lines of code at the beginning, but most of that file is text-data. Every non-programmer should be able to make his own quizzes from this example. Some other files are easy to understand, too. But not all.
For Windows users the support for character-encodings was improved. Now at last they can use their native Windows encodings like "Windows-1252" also known as "MS-ANSI". And yes, they are also supported on GNU/Linux.
The program "avatarsay" is still included in this package, but it is about to be phased out. Most features of "avatarsay" are already rewritten with Lua. Well, the terminal emulation won't be rewritten in Lua, but it will most probably become a separate application in one of the next versions.
Short overview of the changes
- Lua support with program lua-akfavatar — use "./configure --disable-lua" to build without Lua
- largely improved support for charset-encodings under Windows using "win_iconv" (still behind GNU/Linux, but tremendously better than before)
- text-input has full line-editing features
- fix: on text-input the input area gets cleared
- title can have international characters if avt_mb_encoding is called before avt_initialize (but not relyable)
- the pager can handle binary junk better
- filechooser: path can be entered manually
- filechooser: on windows ask for drive letter only when going beyond the root directory
- ./configure: experimental support for "--host=mingw" and "--host=x86" (but don't expect it to work out of the box)
- optimizations
API changes:
- new functions: avt_tell, avt_tell_len, avt_tell_mb, avt_tell_mb_len, avt_markup, avt_get_mb_encoding, avt_set_auto_margin, avt_get_auto_margin, avt_printable, avt_audio_playing
- avt_auto_margin: marked deprecated, use avt_set_auto_argin instead
- avt_free_audio: when the given sound is playing, stops it
- avt_get_key: supports some function keys
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