pictools/README.txt                          September 8, 2007         

		Pictools    
				by Fred Hansen, zweibieen@physpics.com

Pictools are my tools for building and uploading a website.
Their strength is in building pages with pictures and captions.

This distribution untars into a directory pictools/
   and installs into ${PICTOOLS} (they may be the same directory)
For details on the Picools Makefile system,
   see MakeVars or index.html in the distribution pictools/
   or browse to http://physpics.com/pictools/index.html

Requirements:
	The Makefiles are heavily dependent on GNU make.

	Some form of unix is required; all development 
	has been under cygwin and windows XP.

	ImageMagick is used for image manipulation; 
	the cygwin version is fine.

	Space: under a mega-byte. (Each picture takes as much.)

QUICK start:
	1. Untar (or uninzip) the distribution into a directory, say dist/.
		The result is a subdirectory dist/pictools/.
	2. Set environment variable PICTOOLS to the Cygwin
		path to an installation directory: eg, /cygdrive/c/pictools.
		(PICTOOLS can point to the dist/pictools directory.)
	3. Set environment variable PICSRC to the root of web source tree;
		perhaps /cygdrive/c/websrc.
		(There must be no trailing slash on PICTOOLS or PICSRC.)
	4. In dist/pictools/ do:
			make build install test
	5. Review the test logs and output.

Subdirectories of pictools/, as distributed
	images/ - images used in the local .html files
	picsrc/ - files to be installed, 
		some into ${PICSRC} and others into ${PICTOOLS}
	test/ - elementary tests on the pictools tools		

Documentation remains in the distribution directory, dist/pictools/
	index.html     - introduction and overview
	commands.html  - description of the command line utilities
	makefiles.html - details on writing Makefiles 
	templates.html - details on the various file templates
	strftime.html  - details on the parameters to $date()
	usage.html     - how I use these tools

Environment variables:
	PICTOOLS - name in Cygwin format of the pictools directory
		(without trailing slash)
		EG: /cygdrive/c/websrc/pictools
	PICSRC - name in Cygwin format of the root of the
		web pages source directory  (without trailing slash)
		EG: /cygdrive/c/websrc
	PICSTAGE, PICSERVER, PICSDIR - See MakeVars or makefiles.html
	PATH - you can add the ${PICTOOLS} directory to
		the list in the PATH variable

Targets: (when doing 'make' in directory dist/pictools)
	make build: Compile genhtml, prerr, and hex2rgb.
	make install: Copy files from . and ./picsrc 
				to $(PICSRC) and ${PICTOOLS}
	make test: Run a few simple tests. Output is self-descriptive.