Table of Contents

Notes on the release 2.3 of AscToTab
Locating AscToTab on the Web
Locating AscToHTM on the Web
Installing the software
Running the software
It's postcardware Jim, but not as we know it
Contacts
This software is (c) John A Fotheringham 1998

AscToTab 2.3 is free. You may copy this software far and wide, and tell all your friends how good it is. Just make sure that you keep this file with it, so people know who to blam^H^H^H^H thank for it. Where possible, distribute the original .zip file with all the documentation enclosed.

You may not charge for this software - that's my job :) If you wish to place this software on CD you must seek the author's permission by emailing your intentions to jaf@yrl.co.uk. This is primarily to make sure you have the most recent version.

For up to date information on this software, visit the home page at

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/asctotab.html


Notes on the release 2.3 of AscToTab

Thank you for downloading the AscToTab conversion software. AscToTab will convert a plain text file containing a table into a fully-fledged HTML table. It does this by analysing the spaces and layout of your file to see where the columns are, and how many lines go in each cell. If vertical bars are present, these may also be interpreted as column separators.

We've included a sample file tab1.txt to show you what we mean. It looks a bit like this

 
  
 Shot
 Fire
 Damage vs. Armor
Weapon
 Type
 Range
 Rate
 None
 Wood
 Light
 Heavy
Colt 45
 HP
 5.75
 180
 50
 2
 2
 2
AA Gun
 AP
 6
 90
 --
 --
 18
 25
Vulcan
 SA
 5
 22
 40
 20
 24
 10
Maverick
 AP
 6
 300
 15
 37
 37
 50
Fireball
 Fire
 4
 18
 112
 125
 75
 31
Flamer
 Fire
 3.5
 18
 63
 70
 42
 17
Chaingun
 SA
 5
 300
 40
 20
 24
 10

This example demonstrates how AscToTab

Note, AscToTab does not accept comma-separated or Tab-separarted lists as exported from excel, there are other existing tools that do that. Tabs are interpreted by AscToTab as positioning the text on the next 8-character boundary. You have been warned.

AscToTab has evolved out of ongoing development of the more general conversion utility AscToHTM. AscToTab represents a specialised subset of the functionality offered by AscToHTM.

AscToHTM is offered as shareware, and thus AscToTab may be thought of as a "free sample" of AscToHTM. AscToHTM has been awarded 5 stars by ZDNet, the first (and only?) text to HTML converter to gain this, their highest award.

AscToTab 2.3 represents a small change over version 1.1. The reason for the large change in version number is to synchronize version numbers with AscToHTM 2.3. From now on AscToTab will only be developed and released as and when AscToHTM is. Presently a minor release of AscToHTM occurs every 2-3 months.

Because of the now-common interface shared between the two programs, AscToTab now supports wildcards and "policy" files. This will allow you to set document titles, colours and much more. See the documentation for fuller details. You really won't get the full benefit unless you do :)


Locating AscToTab on the Web

The AscToTab home page is currently

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/AscToTab.html

The on-line documentation for the current version can be found at

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/doco/a2tdoco.html

A copy of that file is included in this .ZIP file

The latest downloads can be found at

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/A2tdownload.html


Locating AscToHTM on the Web

 Should you wish to convert text other that just tables, we urge you to investigate AscToHTM which produced the HTML versions of these files from the text versions (match the spelling mistakes if you don't believe me). It's pages are

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/asc2html.html
http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/a2hdownload.html

and its documentation is at

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~jaf/doco/A2H.HTM


Installing the software

Simply unzip the zip file. If you're reading this, you've done that already :)


Running the software

See the doco for more details. It will depend on your operating system. Basically AscToTab runs from the command line as follows

AscToTab <filespec> [<policy_file>] [/qualifiers]

You'll need to check the documentation for fuller details, I'm not typing all that in twice :)


It's postcardware Jim, but not as we know it

Initially this software was offered as postcardware, but not one person sent me a postcard. A few people sent nice email asking me to change the software or to give them the code, but that doesn't count :(

Now this software is nearly-freeware, i.e it's free, except that I've plastered adverts for AscToHTM all over the documetation (you know you really should try it, it's very good). If you want more free software, visit Yezerski Roper's web site at

http://www.yrl.co.uk/~yr/Free/

Finally, if you continue to use the software, at your conscience gets to you, be the first on your block (in the world?) and send me a postcard (it doesn't have to say anything apart from "AscToTab was here", but if you put an email address on it I promise to say "thank you"). Postcards should be sent to

John A Fotheringham
35 Nursery Road
Heaton Norris
Stockport
SK4 2ND
UK


Contacts

 Any problems or feedback should be mailed to jaf@yrl.co.uk. I'm reasonably open to bug reports and suggested improvements.

Once again, thanks for looking

John A Fotheringham 01-May-1998