xfractint - fractal generation program

xfractint [options] [; comments]

Xfractint draws a wide variety of fractals. Xfractint is a port of the IBM PC program fractint. Xfractint has online documentation which should be referenced for most operation information. Note that the online documentation is from fractint, and does not always accurately describe xfractint. A text version of the online documentation can be generated by running ``make doc''.

-display display_name

Specifies the X11 display to use.

-onroot

Indicates the resulting images should appear on the root window. Note: rubberband zoom boxes don't work on the root window.

-private

Indicates that xfractint should allocate as many colors as possible in a private colormap. Normally xfractint will use 128 colors; this flag will let you use all 256, but may mess up the colors in other windows. This is not necessary if you are using greater than 8-bit color.

-slowdisplay

Indicates that the machine has a slow display, so the scrolling window should be updated infrequently. Use this flag if xfractint hangs on the title screen.

-fast

Indicates that xfractint should use the faster drawing mode. Instead of drawing each pixel immediately, xfractint will save up pixels and then refresh the screen every 5 seconds. Depending on your X implementation, this may make drawing twice as fast.

-disk

Use disk video. That is, generate the picture in memory instead of to the screen. The resulting picture can be saved as a gif file or printer file.

-fixcolors num

Specifies the number of colors to use. This number must be a power of two. Also, this number can't be greater than the number of colors available. And, it can't be greater than 256.

-geometry WxH[{+-X}{+-Y}]

This sets the size and position of the image window. The default is 640x480 pixels.

-share

Indicates that xfractint should share the current colormap. That is, xfractint uses as many colors as possible, but doesn't modify the colormap. This is not necessary with greater than 8-bit colors.

-simple

Uses simpler keyboard handling. Use this flag if you wish to debug xfractint with gdb, or else you may get "(gdb)" repeated infinitely.

xxx=yyy

Sets variable xxx to value yyy. See the online documentation for more details on the possible variables.

@filename

Loads parameters from the specified file.

@filename/groupname

Reads a named group of parameters from the specified file.

There are many bugs and things that haven't been implemented.

Boundary tracing sometimes locks up.

Passes=2 has problems??

Symmetry that is offset slightly doesn't always complete the image.

The top of the help screens are messed up. Starting your xterm with

-geometry 80x25 fixes this.

Xfractint uses a bizarre (to Unix users) user interface which was directly copied from the IBM version. If you don't have the appropriate keys, use the following key mappings:

IBM             Unix
F1 to F10       Shift-1 to Shift-0
INSERT          I
DELETE          D
PAGE_UP         U
PAGE_DOWN       N
LEFT_ARROW      H
RIGHT_ARROW     L
UP_ARROW        K
DOWN_ARROW      J
HOME            O
END             E
CTL_PLUS        }
CTL_MINUS       {

Copyright 1991 - 2004 by The Stone Soup Group

The original Unix port was done by Ken Shirriff (shirriff@eng.sun.com).
Xfractint was updated to Fractint 19.5 by Tim Wegner (twegner@fractint.org)
under Linux 2.0. Please report updates for other platforms to Tim Wegner.
The current official release is 20.0.
The primary authors of Fractint 20.0 are:
Timothy Wegner         twegner@fractint.org
Jonathan Osuch         josuch@fractint.org
George Martin          ggmartin@compuserve.com
Robin Bussell          robin.b2@ukonline.co.uk