.ptn files produced by Brad Keister's
free
WinWeave
drawdown programs. It should also work for files produced by his
earlier Weave program (for DOS; WinWeave is for Windows).
The ptn2wif program is not a fancy Windows program with a
graphical user interface; instead, it designed to run in a
conventional ``command line'' environment, like an MS-DOS prompt
window under Windows 95 or Windows NT, or like a Linux or Unix shell.
Suppose you have a file called mydraft.ptn. Then at the MS-DOS prompt
or Linux/Unix shell prompt, you could type
ptn2wif mydraft.ptnand the WIF output would come spilling out onto your screen. If instead you would rather it went into a file, for example one called
mydraft.wif, you would instead use the command
ptn2wif mydraft.ptn >mydraft.wif
.ptn files contain only an indication of which
threads should be in color 1, color 2, etc., up to color 16, but not
what actual color each of those 16 color numbers should be. If you
use ptn2wif as shown above, it will first look to see if
there is a winweave.clr file. That is the file that
WinWeave stores your default color settings in, if you choose to save
them. If this file exists, then ptn2wif uses it as the
source of the information regarding what color each of the 16 color
numbers is. If the file doesn't exist, than ptn2wif will
assume the default color settings that WinWeave starts up with.
If you want to use a different palette of colors, you can explicitly
tell ptn2wif to use a .clr file saved out
from WinWeave. For example, suppose you had saved your color choices
out in mycolors.clr. Then you could use the command
ptn2wif mydraft.ptn mycolors.clr >mydraft.wif
ptn2wif, you might first
want to check whether a new version has appeared. The current version is
version 0.1; you can see your copy's version number in its WIF output.
ptn2wif.exe, which will run in an
MS-DOS prompt window under Windows 95 or NT. Important
note: due to a limitation of how I compiled this program, it
works in only one of the three possible ways of running the program:
cd command, for example, cd
\winweave to change to the \winweave directory) and run
ptn2wif as shown above.
ptn2wif won't
work; it will give you a message telling you as much.
ptn2wif from Windows,
without going into the MS-DOS prompt. For example, you can't just
double-click on the icon, or use the Run command from the Start menu.
If you try this, you'll see a window flash up on the screen briefly
and immediately disappear again.
If you are a programmer and want the source code for the program,
written in C, you are welcome to ptn2wif.c. That would let you recompile
it to run on other systems; I've only tested it under Linux and
Windows 95/NT, but the code should be portable. You could also make
modifications, or make a Windows or DOS version that is less picky
about how it is run. If you come up with something useful and are in
the mood to share, let me know and I'd be happy to make it available
from this web page. Thanks.
The answers are as follows: