/* $Id$ */ /** \page libcaca-tutorial A libcucul and libcaca tutorial Before writing your first libcaca application, you need to know the difference between libcucul and libcaca : - libcucul is the text rendering library. It will do all the work you actually need. From imports (text, ANSI, caca internal format, all of this supporting n-bytes unicode), to exports (sames formats, adding SVG, PostScript, TGA, HTML (both 3 and 4), IRC), it'll cover all your needs. - libcaca handle everything that can be hardware related. It includes display (RAW, X11, OpenGL, Windows (GDI), conio (DOS), ncurses, slang, text VGA (IMB-Compatible)), keyboard (same drivers but RAW), mouse (same drivers but RAW and VGA), time and resize events (on windowed drivers). So, you can write a libcucul only program, but you can't write a libcaca only program, it'll be nonsense. Period. First, a working program, very simple, to check you can compile and run it: \code #include #include int main(void) { /* Initialise libcaca */ cucul_canvas_t *cv; caca_display_t *dp; caca_event_t ev; cv = cucul_create_canvas(0, 0); if(!cv) return 1; dp = caca_create_display(cv); if(!dp) return 1; /* Set window title */ caca_set_display_title(dp, "Hello!"); /* Choose drawing colours */ cucul_set_color_ansi(cv, CUCUL_BLACK, CUCUL_WHITE); /* Draw a string at coordinates (0, 0) */ cucul_put_str(cv, 0, 0, "This is a message"); /* Refresh display */ caca_refresh_display(dp); /* Wait for a key press event */ caca_get_event(dp, CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS, &ev, -1); /* Clean up library */ caca_free_display(dp); cucul_free_canvas(cv); return 0; } \endcode What does it do ? (we skip variable definitions, guessing you have a brain) : - Create a cucul canvas. A canvas is where everything happens. Writing characters, sprites, strings, images, everything. It is mandatory and is the reason of libcuculs' beeing. Size is there a width of 0 pixels, and a height of 0 pixels. It'll be resized according to contents you put in it. - Create a caca display. This is basically the window. Physically it can be a window (most of the displays), a console (ncurses, slang) or a real display (VGA). - Set the window name of our display (only available in windowed displays, does nothing otherwise). (so this is libcaca related) - Set current colors to black background, and white foreground of our canvas (so this is libcucul related) - Put a string "This is a message" with current colors in our libcucul canvas. - Refresh our caca display, whish was firstly attached to our canvas - Wait for an event of type "CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS", which seems obvious. - Free display (release memory) - Free canvas (release memory and close window if any) You can then compile this code under UNIX-like systems with following command : (you'll need pkg-config and gcc) \code gcc `pkg-config --libs --cflags cucul caca` example.c -o example \endcode */