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#          S O L U T I O N S       "Software done right."
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# Author   : Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@ieee.org>
# Project  : banner
# Revision : $Id: README 385 2004-04-17 21:17:00Z pronovic $
# Purpose  : README for the banner program
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I've used a lot of different UN*X systems, and all of them, as far as I can
tell, seem to provide a "banner" program that prints some short string in large
letters.  Except Linux.  When I wrote this, I couldn't seem to find something
like this anywhere (well, there is /usr/games/banner, but that's different than
a typical banner implementation).  So, since it was such a simplistic thing to
do, I wrote it myself.  

The 'banner' program prints a "banner" on the screen that corresponds to the 
first X characters of a string entered on the command line. 

Say you'd like to print "KEN" in big letters.  Use:

   banner ken

and you'll get back:

   #    #  #######  #     #
   #   #   #        ##    #
   #  #    #        # #   #
   ###     #####    #  #  #
   #  #    #        #   # #
   #   #   #        #    ##
   #    #  #######  #     #

It's pretty configurable on a compile-time basis.  The letter definitions can
be changed by changing the array definitions in "letters.h".  The defined
letter height, the number of spaces after each letter, the max letters of a
given string that will be printed, etc. are all controlled from in there.  The
only real restriction is that all of the letters have to be the same height.
Note, however, that there is no facility for printing lower-case letters - as
far as I can remember, Solaris and AIX don't have that, and I didn't feel like
putting it in.  Adding it would be easy, if you want to come up with letter
definitions for the lower-case letters.

Yeah, yeah, this IS a pretty simple program, and it doesn't really need a GNU 
autoconf setup and all that stuff - it's just ANSI C.  This just gave me an 
excuse to learn autoconf... ;-)   

Note that since I haven't updated this much recently, it probably will only
work with older (obsolete?) versions of Automake and Autoconf.  I have
built the latest 1.2.2 distribution using Automake v1.4 and Autoconf v2.13
under Debian 'sarge':

   aclocal; automake; autoconf; ./configure; make dist; make distclean

I don't think you'll have any success re-generating things with newer
versions of these tools, but if you do, please let me know.

I have successfully built this program under various versions of Linux, as
well as Solaris 2.8 and AIX 4.3.  Under my install of AIX, it looks like
you need to use:

   CC='cc -L/usr/lib' ./configure

in order for things to work properly.  I suspect this is a problem with the
way the compiler is configured on my machine, but it might help you if you
have problems there.

KJP 06/11/2000
    09/08/2003