XaoS online help - AA-lib driver
Description: XaoS, realtime, fractal, zoomer

# AA-lib driver

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.