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#              C E D A R
#          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 1329 2013-04-03 02:20:18Z pronovic $
# Purpose  : README for the banner program
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This is a classic-style banner program similar to the one found in Solaris
or AIX in the late 1990s.  It prints a short string to the console in very
large letters.

This is the default banner implementation for some Linux distributions,
such as Gentoo and Fedora.  Other distributions like Debian have a
different implementation.  I am a Debian developer and I run Debian on all
of my machines, so I don't actually use this code on a regular basis any
more.

When I first wrote this code back in the late 1990s, the Linux world was a
different place.  At the time, my README said:

   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.  

Using the program is easy, for instance:

   > banner ken
   #    #  #######  #     #
   #   #   #        ##    #
   #  #    #        # #   #
   ###     #####    #  #  #
   #  #    #        #   # #
   #   #   #        #    ##
   #    #  #######  #     #

The terminal is assumed to be 80 columns wide.  If you have $COLUMNS
exported in your environment, it's taken to be the width of the terminal.
That way, you can print wider strings if you need to.

From time to time, people assert that this program is buggy because it
doesn't do something that some other banner implementation does.  The
behavior of the program is based on what I saw on Solaris and AIX systems
at the time I wrote it in the late 1990s.  I make no claims that the
behavior is identical to that of any other contemporary system, especially
any non-free system that I may or may not have access to. 

If you don't like the behavior, you can either submit a patch, or you can
use an alternative program such as figlet.  I am always happy to accept
patches, and I promise to integrate patches promptly if provided.  So far,
no one who's complained has bothered to provide any patches, so the
behavior remains the same.

Historically, I have built and run this program under various versions of
Linux as well as Solaris 2.8 and AIX 4.3.  These days (2013) I don't have
access to very many non-Linux systems with compilers, so I've only tested
the code under Debian.

I do not update this code very often.  As a result, the autoconf and
automake definitions are typically out-of-date.  Most recently (2013),
Fedora asked me to update autoconf so that the package would support the
ARM 64-bit architecture.  If you need a change like this, please let me
know and I'm happy to take care of it.  However, I do not plan to make
releases on a regular basis just to update these definitions.

The code is 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.

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... These days, I maintain it for the sake
of nostalgia. ;-)   

KJP 06/11/2000
    09/08/2003
    04/02/2013