ALE 0.5.1 User Manual

Purpose

This page summarizes ALE program operation and command-line usage.

Other manual pages in this section describe rendering and alignment.

For more information on ALE, see the ALE Home Page.

Program Operation and Usage

Parameter Meta-syntax

`<foo>`	A required parameter called foo.
`[<foo>]`	An optional parameter called foo.
`[<foo>]*`	Zero or more parameters foo.

Command-line syntax for Version Information

The following command-line invocation can be used to print version information and build options:

ale --version

The following is sample output from this invocation:

ALE Version:      0.5.1
File handler:     ImageMagick
Bits per channel: 8

The above output indicates that the ALE version is 0.5.1, that ImageMagick is being used to handle image files, and that a 24-bit color space is being used.

Command-line syntax for Help Output

When invoked with no options, or options detected as incorrect, ALE outputs a help message specifying command-line usage and available options. The following is a sample invocation:

ale

Command-line syntax for Image Processing

The following is the normal command-line invocation for ALE, and is used to process a series of frames into an output file:

ale [<option>]* <original-frame> [<supplemental-frame>]* <output-file>

The original-frame parameter, and each supplemental-frame parameter, should match the filename of an image file. Output will be written to the output file specified.

Depending on compile options, the file handler used may be ImageMagick or an internal PPM file handler (use the --version flag to check this). When ImageMagick is used for file handling, input files can be any of the types that ImageMagick can handle, and the output file type should be specified by file extension. The internal PPM file handler can be used to read and write PPM files only. However, on many platforms, ImageMagick's command line utilties can be used to convert between PPM and other file formats.

Options are outlined in the rendering and alignment subsections.

Subsections

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