home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Fritz: All Fritz
/
All Fritz.zip
/
All Fritz
/
FILES
/
GRAPTIES
/
ANOTHER1.LZH
/
TMWPART1.EXE
/
lha
/
TMW.DOC
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-02
|
7KB
|
132 lines
************************ BEGIN HERE *************************
THE MULTIMEDIA WORKSHOP
Presentation Creation Program
Version 4.21
Copyright 1992, Jeff Napier & Another Company
WHO IS THE MULTIMEDIA WORKSHOP FOR?
The Multimedia Workshop was created for anyone who has
something to say. Use it to make professional-quality
disk-based illustrated catalogs, teaching tutorials or
employee training materials, electronic books, multimedia
presentations, retail or shareware products. It will also
function as a general drawing program resulting in pictures
you can save on disk or print onto paper. For teachers,
artists and authors, it's powers are obvious. For everyone,
you'll find it is easy to create disks that get your ideas to
the public. In fact, this instruction manual will not only
cover all the basics of using The Multimedia Workshop, but
will also explain how to write and market your products as
shareware.
(Even if you don't have artistic talent, with just a
little practice, you'll be able to turn out impressive disks
with drawings or simple yet effective diagrams containing
colorful boxes, ellipses, arrows etc, to make your point!
Furthermore, you can collect and use clip-art, files created
by other people, in most standard .PCX formats or in
ASCII-Vector-Graphics)
WHAT DOES THE MULTIMEDIA WORKSHOP DO?
The simplest way to state the nature of The Multimedia
Workshop is to say that it is a drawing program that does a
whole lot more than any other drawing program. It allows you
to incorporate sound effects, music and speech into pictures
without special equipment. Sound Blaster is also supported.
You can create animation with it. The Multimedia Workshop
has a simple word processor built in. There are features
found in CAD programs, such as Grid and Coordinate Display so
that you can make very precise pictures. These multimedia
pictures can be drawn in Hercules, CGA, EGA or VGA graphics,
depending on which video modes your computer can support. It
runs fine with or without Microsoft Windows.
It comes with a run-time display engine allowing you to
chain your pictures together for sophisticated presentations.
The run-time engine has features including automatically
repeating shows for continuous unattended presentations,
automatic indexing with which the end user can search for any
word or phrase within your presentation's pictures, and
super-easy-to-use keyboard or mouse operated menu.
The Multimedia Workshop uses ASCII-Vector-Graphics,
which is a wonderful system in which each element of a
picture is recorded in an ordinary ASCII file on disk as it
is drawn. For instance, a rectangle appears in the file as R
followed by integers representing the location and size of
the rectangle. A circle is represented by a C, followed by
numbers marking it's location and radius. A line is
represented with an L, an ellipse is an E, and so on. Color
changes have codes, sound effects have codes, pattern fills
have codes and so on. Text that appears in the pictures
appears simply as text in the ASCII file, although text is
preceded by some simple numbers representing the font and
position of the text in the picture.
The advantages of AVG are tremendous. Most
significantly, a whole lot of graphic information can be
written into a really small file. This means you can put up
to 100 separate pictures on an ordinary 360k floppy disk!
Furthermore, Ascii-Vector-Graphics is the secret behind sound
effects, animation and text-search within pictures. If you
spend time communicating on BBS's you'll especially
appreciate that complicated pictures can be sent by modem
quickly because of their small size.
*********************** HOW IT WORKS ************************
The files which compose a presentation are simply ASCII
files which contain codes for picture elements, sound
effects, animations and more. We call them SCRIPT FILES. The
Multimedia Workshop or MSHOW.EXE read these files and follow
the coded instructions, step-by-step.
*********************** REQUIREMENTS ************************
The requirements are few. Almost any IBM-compatible
computer will work if it has a standard graphics card and a
hard disk. At least 640k of RAM is also required. It works
fine on laptop computers with CGA or VGA monochrome displays.
(NOTE If you don't have a hard disk: A hard disk is only
required to decompress the files for first time use. If you
have no hard drive, you can have a friend decompress the
files, copy them onto several floppies, and then you can use
The Multimedia Workshop.)
If you have a mouse and a fast CPU, The Multimedia
Workshop runs more efficiently, but these options are NOT
required. It works fine with or without Microsoft Windows
version 3.0/3.1.
If your computer has a VGA graphics system, you'll be
able to create presentations in high-resolution VGA, or lower
resolution CGA, EGA or Hercules, for use on other computers.
If your computer has a non-VGA graphics system, you'll be
able to create presentations at the highest resolution and
number of colors your system can support. These will be
displayable on other, similarly-equipped computers as well.
Any end user with a standard IBM-compatible computer and
graphics card and at least 512k RAM will be able to display
your creations. End users do not need hard disks.
LEGAL STUFF
There are probably a few bugs. This program is growing
quite sophisticated and development is continuing. I plainly
state right here: You use this at your own risk. I will take
no responsibility for any results of the use of this program.
- Jeff Napier -
August 28, 1992
_____________________________________________________________
end of chapter