--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
			XBACKDROP		v1.02
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	This release is primarily a bug fix for some oversights of mine when I
went to release the package. I have replaced the shoddy file existance check
with a slightly better one and removed the C++ comments accidently left in
(thanks go to James Antill for pointing these out). I figured I should state my
intentions for this package to prevent some of the more common types of
feedback.
	First of all, this code is pure hack. It is nothing amazing and was done
in around five to six hours. The focus of this package was to produce a system
that worked without requiring a large amount of time and using only what little
programming I already knew. In fact, most of the operations are accomplished by
delegating to other utilities. I have no experience with any graphical toolkits,
including Tk/TCL, Gtk, Athena Widgets, or Motif. Therefore, producing a GUI for
this program is out of the question for now. I, too, would like to have a nice
background manager along the lines of a Second Nature system, but simply don't
have the time or knowledge to make one right now. When I do learn on or more of
these libraries, I may recode this program. However, I honestly expected this
utility to have been succeeded by a better program by that time. This program
was only meant as a temporary tool for users until someone has the time and
ambition to code a full-fledged image manager.
	For the same reasons, I currently have no intention of extending this
program. I have too many other thing that I consider more important than an
image manager for X-Windows, including learning more libraries and trying my
hand at game and operating system programming. This package simply came to be
because of a personal itch. All image manipulation extensions would have to come
from the utilities called by this program. I may make some nips and tucks to the
image archive system as needed, as I did when adding collection support, but do
not plan any major extensions.
	Finally, I have no intention of ever releasing this package with images.
I know that this is annoying, since it prevents the package from working
properly straight `out of the box'. However, I do not know nor have the time to
investigate the copyright status of images. Nor will I be liable for something
based simply on someone's assurance that an image can be freely distributed. I
recommed that any person seeking images use the web and search for the artists
names along with keywords like `archive', `gallery', or `artwork'. These
searches turn up quite a few sites where images can be found. Being a sick
person, I recommend the artwork of H.R.Giger, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, 
M.C.Escher, and Michael Whelan. The latter of these is not actually sick, but is
one of the best fantasy artists around.
	
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Readme from v0.9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------						

	After using the utility for a short while, I noticed an annoying little
trait- my image collections that contained lotsa images overwhelmed all of the
other collections, preventing them from hardly ever being displayed. I decided
to do a little revision and add support for defining collections of images that
use separate image files. This way, you can specify weights for the collections,
just like the individual images, that are independent of the number of images in
a collection. Yeah! Also, I realized the need to debugging actions relating to
images. For example, if an image gets displayed that is messed up, you have no
way of identifying it other than going through every image listed in the image
file. Boring! Now, the program logs the current collection and image path to a
temporary file. The only other change was to move most of the customizable stuff
into a header file for easier analysis (added a lil' most description so that
you can figure out what to change- hopefully ;)
	By the way, the name of the new collections file is `collections' by
default and should be placed in the global configuration and/or the user's
configuration directory. (Both of these directories are defined in the
xbackdrop.h header) As the image file path is now specified in the collections
file, the `images' file is no longer used. However, the `image' example is still
left in the etc subdirectory as an example of the syntax for every image file.
Please excuse the lack of documentation; I am working on other things and don't
really have time to be doing this in the first place. Anyone with ideas and/or
comments relating to the package, I can be contacted through e-mail using
plh@bec04.phy.gasou.edu. (Don't expect a quick response)
	P.S. I kinda tested the daemon-like option for periodically changing the
backdrop and it seems to work fine. I start it in the `.Xclients' X startup
script and it appears to be killed automatically when I quit X. I love it when I
don't have to do anything. If I left out anything big, feel free to e-mail.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Readme from v0.9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------						

	Xbackdrop is a utility that provides a UNIX system user with an image
manager for X-Windows. Originally, I had the idea about making this utility for
two reasons. First, the Internet provides easy access to many great artworks
that look much better than the solid colors do. Second, when I looked for
something that did this, I didn't find much. All I found was a few utilities
that were thrown together by someone else who, like me, did not want to spend
much time on this. So, like any other insane programmer, I made a utility. After
looking around a little while, I found the xli and xloadimage utilities, which
are almost identical. Originally, I threw together some sloppy code, debug it to
the point that it didn't crash every time it ran, and slapped a label on it.
I called this early piece of junk backdrop. Why? I don't know. It sounded good
and I couldn't think of another package that used the name. Viola. It took me
about a week to get annoyed by this junk and vow to actually design a
replacement, but, contrary to popular belief, I had more important things to do.
Now, about half a year later, I had a day when I didn't have anything pressing
to do; so I sat down with a mediocre design that I had drawn up over the off
time and tried to code quickly something that I would at least be content with.
After about six hours of coding and debugging, it lives.
	Xbackdrop is intentionally simple in both form and function. It uses one
rc file for operational settings and another file for a list of images and
options relating to each image. The options allow the user to specify virtually
any effect supported by both xli v1p16 and xloadimage v4.1 including brightness
adjustment and scaling. Also, some extra features, such as autoscaling with and
without clipping were added to scratch my own personal itch. I also added an
option to make the program go to sleep and awaken at specified intervals to
change the background image. This was meant to emulate the Windows image
collections that can be configured to change the background at minute or hourly
intervals. However, I didn't feel like coding anything to detect whether X is
actually running, so if the program is started from a X-Windows startup script,
it will probably have to be killed explicitly at exit. If anyone wants to rig
this on their own machines, it can probably be done easily using the 'kill'
command along with the name of the process ('xbackdrop'). As I mentioned before,
I haven't bothered to deal with this since I don't personally use it. The two
files contained in the etc directory are sample configuration files. For a
system (global) configuration, these files should be placed in the
/etc/xbackdrop directory. Each user can then customize the images used and
weights by making copies of these files and putting them in a directory named
.xbackdrop in their respective home directories.
	In theory, the code should compile 'out-of-the-box'. If it doesn't--
good luck! Odds are, if the code won't compile, it has to do with the system
header files. Check to make sure that all files being referenced in the header
of xbackdrop.c exist in the system. If not, it may still be possible to compile
the code by hacking it, but your on our own. As previously mentioned, the
program is really just a complex front end for the xli and xloadimage utilities.
Most of the extra features, like image decompression, are done by using the UNIX
utilities rather than coding the processes directly. As I said, quick-n-dirty.
However, this does give the program a little more versatility than a normal
utility, since it acts more like a shell script.


	The entries in the configuration files are documented, but
	here's a summary of the image options:
		Weight		number of points to assign to image (>=1)
		Bright		percentage of brightness of image to use
		Colors		maxmimum number of color to use in image
					0 => use default for file
		Dither		dithering method to use with image
					n => don't dither
					c => color dither
					b => black & white dither
		Smooth		number of smoothing iterations to use
			        with image
		Zoom		percentage of image size to use
					0 => scale image to full screen
		Normalize	normalize image flag (y,n)
		Rotation	clockwise number of degrees to rotate image
					(0,90,180,270)
		Uncompress	decompress file before display flag (y,n)
		Border		X-Windows color reference for border are
				on background not covered by image
		ImagePath	path to the image that is to be displayed
				(can probably use xlirc file paths to
				 allow abbreviated names)

	That's it!	
