This tutorial is written by Shawn Quinn

From: skquinn@brokersys.com (Shawn K. Quinn)
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: GIFSCII.EXE for DOS
Date: 31 May 1996 13:01:26 GMT

In message <Ds7Dnr.9E8@sig.net> - Shane Hall <browpin-shane@web-access.net> wri
tes:
:>Does anyone have any tips or tricks for using GIFSCII? It has no docs and 
:>no built-in help. It offers 3 prompts: name of gif, columns and lines. 
:>The author told me to hit ENTER at the last 2 prompts and then I will get 
:>a menu to View, Save and other things. I never get this menu.

The way I remember it, it goes like this:

Start the program, give it the name of a GIF. It will then prompt you for 
number of columns and rows, and should give you this table:

Lines     Columns    Lines        Columns
Spec.      Spec.     Output       Output
-----      -----     -----         -----
  0          0       GH/10        GW/6
  0          C       C*GH/GW*.6   C
  L          0       L            L*GW/GH/.6
  L          C       L            C

This means (1) Gifscii will default to giving you one ASCII row for each 10 
GIF rows, and one ASCII column for each 6 GIF columns, (2) if you specify 
only a number of columns or rows, it will default to keeping the same aspect
ratio when figuring out the other value, and (3) if you specify both it will 
make an ASCII picture of exactly that size.

NOTE: any GIF wider than 480 columns or taller than 240 rows WILL NOT FIT on 
an 80x24 screen if you accept both defaults! This includes ANY 256-COLOR GIF 
that fills the screen or comes close in SVGA resolutions! Whip out your 
calculator if needed to figure out what to tell the program.

Then comes the tricky part. You'll get this prompt:

(v)iew (zZ)oom (s)ave (lrud)=Pan (i)nvert (h)elp (cC)cont (bB)bright:

These describe the options. These do pretty much the same as ASCGIF, 
unfortunately, I don't think that came with docs either. Typing in an "h" 
will show a help screen. Most of the options let you tweak the way the 
conversion is done so it will hopefully show up better. Be prepared to alter 
the GIF after conversion in case it doesn't quite look the way you had hoped.

I really wish the authors would not rely on the source code comments to 
effectively document the program the way some do. Some people don't even 
download the source code. I do if there's no doc file, because I know better.
Of course if there are no comments in the source code, that's a problem too...

SKQ