CHROMA Version 1.0 (build 1185)-- Console Version

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Requirements

Introduction

    The source code console version of CHROMA is being released as a service to the wider academic community. It is expected that the users in console versions of CHROMA will be more proficient in the use and understanding of their operating systems. Please do not expect too much hand holding!  

    Console CHROMA accepts the same range of file format as the Windows Client, i.e. MSF, CLUSTALW etc. Files can be piped in directly via stdin and the HTML code comes out of stdout, much as you might expect. When parsing errors occur for whatever reason, a diagnostic message is dumped to stderr and the input sequences are passed though unannotated but bracketed with <pre> to stdout.

Development Plans

    At the moment, CHROMA produces a full HTML file with <HEAD> <STYLE> etc. We have been piping the CHROMA output to a separate HTML pane. Netscape, MS Internet Explorer and Opera all seem to allow entire HTML files (with header) to be incorporated willy-nilly into the middle of another page though this is not compliant HTML code. The future plan is for CHROMA to optionally produce just the <body> part with a separate utility generating the style tags:

    <html>
        ...
        <head>
        ... 
        <..! output from baby chroma helper utility for pretty colour styles goes here>
        ... 
        </head>
        <body>
             ... 
            <..! output from console CHROMA goes here>
             ...
        </body>
    </html>

Binaries

    The distribution includes the console CHROMA statically linked binary compiled by GCC 4.

Re-compiling source code

    The included source code is as conformant to the ANSI standard C++ as possible, and thus should be readily portable to other systems.
    A GCC makefile is included so recompiling under Linux should be relatively pain free.

Runtime configuration files

    The configuration file for CHROMA is chroma.opt (which uses a self-explanatory aaa=bbb format) while the colouring scheme is set by chroma.cft. The locations for both is hardwired at compile time to "/usr/etc/" (also set in the makefile). Future versions of CHROMA will allow command line parameters to over-riding chroma.opt defaults as well.

 

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CHROMA Version 1.0 (build 1185) -- Console Version