/*********************/
         boxes draws any              /* boxes draws any   */
         kind of boxes        ===>    /* kind of boxes     */
         around your text!            /* around your text! */
                                      /*********************/

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

News

December 14, 2009 (Monday, 22:23h)

Boxes in the press: boxes got an honorable mention on dancingpenguinsoflight.com. Samuel Huckins says: "boxes provides boundless entertainment." That's exaggerated, but very nice.

July 23, 2006 (Sunday, 23:07h)

Version 1.1 is out. Version 1.1 is essentially a maintenance release, which solves all compilation and compatibility issues reported to the author. This mainly affected modern Linuxes. I took the opportunity to also apply all patches that had been submitted, and added tab handling options for leading tabs (see what's new). Get it from the download page.
Now, I am looking for help with the binary distributions, which should be brought up to level 1.1. Any contributions are greatly appreciated!

July 12, 2006 (Wednesday, 23:50h)

A new code snapshot is available on the download page. Most notably, it includes Andreas Heiduk's patch for compilation with present-day flexes.

June 16, 2006 (Friday, 14:01h)

Boxes in the press: Shashank Sharma wrote an article on boxes for Linux.com. Here's the direct link to the article.

February 26, 2006 (Sunday, 15:14h)

I finally put some new box designs submitted by users of boxes up on the download page. Also, there is a new patch by Elmar Loos, who added a "repair" option -m to boxes. Using -m, you can remove a damaged box and redraw it in one go. And last but not least, Jason Shiffer updated his emacs mode for boxes.

December 09, 2003 (Tuesday, 22:23h)

Boxes in the press: Andreas Kneib's article was translated into English and now appears in issue 38 (January 2004) of Linux Magazine! Here's the direct link to the article.

November 20, 2003 (Thursday, 21:00h)

Boxes in the press: The 12/2003 issue of Linux User Magazine (German language) features an article on ASCII Art software by Andreas Kneib. The article covers figlet, cadubi, and boxes.

February 05, 2002 (Tuesday, 21:51h)

boxes has moved to a new home: http://boxes.thomasjensen.com/. This will help keep boxes available to you for years to come! :-)

December 18, 2000 (Monday, 14:03h)

Jason L. Shiffer has just updated his Emacs mode for boxes to automatically adapt to new box styles.

December 01, 2000 (Friday, 13:45h)

Edward Roper says that the -traditional flag should be removed from the regexp Makefile to compile on Red Hat Linux 7.0. This minor compilation issue was reported by other Linux people as well. You must do this manually until the next release.

March 18, 2000 (Saturday, 01:30h)

Version 1.0.1 is out. Version 1.0.1 is essentially identical to the 08-Nov-1999 snapshot, with the addition of the Win32 port by Ron Aaron. Get it from the download page.

March 09, 2000 (Thursday, 18:27h)

The much requested Win32 Port has been made available on the download page (at the bottom of the "Binary Distributions" section)!

November 03, 1999 (Wednesday, 01:16h)

Jason L. Shiffer wrote an Emacs mode for boxes. So all of you who've been waiting for information on boxes integration with Emacs, please see the installation page.

August 31, 1999 (Tuesday, 18:02h)

Many contributions to the download page have been made by various people, including FreeBSD ports, a Solaris 2.5.1 port, and Red Hat RPM packages. The current snapshot now compiles on more platforms (even on OSF/1, when -D_ANSI_C_SOURCE is added to the regexp compilation stuff - someone got a binary?).

August 22, 1999 (Sunday, 14:13h)

VERSION 1.0 IS OUT! We finally left the beta stage behind and moved to a stable release. Get it from the download page.

August 19, 1999 (Thursday, 00:32h)

Updated the download page with new binaries (beta version 5). There are currently no known problems with this version.

August 18, 1999 (Wednesday, 21:23h)

A major step in development after a long pause. Improvements include changes to the config file syntax which take care of the backslash explosion. Remember to download the current snapshot rather than the other source archives. Keeping track of boxes development is easiest via the log page, which is the most up-to-date page of this site.

July 04, 1999 (Sunday, 19:42h)

Web page redesign. Lots of docs coming up!

June 30, 1999 (Wednesday, 14:51h)

Added Solaris binary and source archive for current beta2 version. Barring popular request, all features are in. Do still expect enhancements on the design autodetector, GNU configure support (porting) and POSIX support for the regular expression stuff. In other words, go ahead and use this beta, because the user side won't really be affected by the planned changes.

June 16, 1999 (Wednesday, 13:15h)

Added Solaris binary and source archive for current alpha2 version. Other binaries will be made available when development has reached a serious beta state. Most features are already in, but expect a padding option and some minor stuff.

June 04, 1999 (Friday, 13:58h)

Added "Current Snapshot" to download section. This will be updated semi-automatically whenever a minor change was implemented. This particular snapshot just added already includes untested box removal functionality. Consider this an alpha version.

June 02, 1999 (Wednesday, 13:20h)

Added list of box designs, which will from now on be updated periodically. Send me new designs (as config files, of course, not as images) and I'll add 'em if I like 'em.

May 30, 1999 (Sunday, 14:41h) - dev update

Resumed development after pause of nearly two months. Removing boxes worked for the first time. It will be fuzzy! :-D Didn't test yet. Be patient, I can only spend about a half hour to 45 minutes per day on this. (Less than I want to. :()

SEE ALSO: tal, the trailer alignment filter.