MyFract 0.11
------------

What is MyFract

  MyFract is a small program to calculate beautiful images of
  the well known Mandelbrot fractal.

Requirements

  You need OS/2 Warp V3 or newer (2.11 won't do) and the emx runtime
  libraries (you can find these as emxrt.zip on nearly any ftp server).
  High or true colour video modes are recommended but MyFract will 
  nonetheless work with less colours.

Installation

  No installation is required. Just start the executable any way you
  like. MyFract will create a file 'myfract.ini' in the directory
  the executable lives in.


Using MyFract
  
 the basics:

   - drag a zoom window
   - invoke popup-menu
   - select 'Zoom'

  You can also zoom to a new window and pan the current view with
  cursor keys. You can change several settings:

  - Iterations: The maximum iteration depth. Higher values give more
                accurate results but calculation will take longer.
                The scale is logarithmic.

  - Keep proportional: When activated the program will try to maintain
                       the current aspect ratio, so your images won't
                       look sretched.

  - B/W: A greyscale coloring scheme is used

  - Linear: Iteration depth is mapped to the colour in a linear fashion.
            If deactivated colours will change slower on high iteration
            depths.

    Deactivating any of these two options will slightly increase calculation
    time.

   - Colourchange: Higher values result in a more rapid change of
                   colours.

   - Seed: This is the seed for the random colouring. Play with this.
           If you've find a colour scheme you like you can always
           reproduce it by entering the same seed later. This has no
            effect if B/W is active.
           

   - Idle priority: When activated, the calculation has a minimum
                    impact on overall system performance. You may
                    want to deactivate this if you have heavy tasks
                    running which stop MyFract from completing.


 popup menu commands:

   - Settings: A dialog will pop up whcih will let you to change
               several properties of the current window (see above).
               'OK' uses the new values, 'Cancel' ignores any changes
               and 'Save' stores the current settings in MyFract.ini.

   - About:    Program and author information.

   - Save BMP: Saves the image as a truecolor bitmap in the current
               directory. Image files are automatically numbered
               (Fract1.bmp, Fract2.bmp,...). The file will get
               special extended attributes in which the program stores
               Mandelbrot related information. This allows you to
               further work on a loaded image (zooming etc.).

   - Zoom in:  Only available when you have defined a zoom rectangle.
               The program will calculate a new image of the respective
               area in the current or a new window.

   - Zoom out: Zooms out by a factor of 2.


 Saved Images can be loaded via drag'n'drop on an open MyFract window.
 MyFract can only load its own images (due to the additional information
 stored with them) but there should be no problem loading these images
 with any picture viewer or paint program.
 You can also pass a filename as a parameter when starting MyFract from
 the command line or by dropping an image on the MyFract program object.
               

I'm eagerly awaiting bug reports, suggestions and comments of any sort.

--
Frank Thilo - thilo@unix-ag.uni-siegen.de   -   2 June 96
