README

Stylus 1.2.0, Biologic Institute
Inscribe 1.0, Biologic Institute

http://biologicstylus.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/biologicstylus

ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
- Arial Unicode Font (http://www.ascendercorp.com/msfonts/arial_unicode.html)
- Adobe Flash 8.x or greater (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/)
- Batik 1.6 or greater (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/)

WHAT IS INSCRIBE?
Inscribe is a suite of files designed to make creating input for Stylus
easier. It also includes the publicly available Archetypes Stylus requiresf
and a few sample Genes.

INSTALLING INSCRIBE
Researchers use Inscribe by means of three web sites: One for Archetypes,
another for Genes, and the last for accessing the Inscribe tools. Researchers
using Apache (1.x or 2.x) can create the web sites by adding the included
apache.conf file, after modifying the contained paths, to their httpd.conf.
Hosting Inscribe in other web servers will follow similar steps.

INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS
Both the Inscribe tool and the Inscribe web site depend on the Arial Unicode
font. The Archetype tool requires a suite of image files (.PNG) created from
the font; all other pages rely on the font for proper display (meaning, the
font must be installed on the browsing computer). Additionally, building new
Archetypes requires Flash 8.x or above (see http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/).

While the data files and scripts for building the images are present, they
also rely on the SVG rasterizer, Batik, available from the Apache Project.
To build the images, follow these steps:

- Download Batik 1.6 or greater
- Modify ./html/scripts/makeImages.pl to reference the locally installed
  Batik package
- From the ./html/scripts directory, run the buildImages.sh script

Generating the entire suite of images takes about 1-2 hours depending on the
hardware.

BUILDING ARCHETYPES AND GENES
Researchers may build their own archetypes and genes by browsing to the
Inscribe web site. Selecting the "Archetype" option will bring up the Inscribe
Flash tool. The tool has several steps by which a researcher creates the
description of an archetype. Selecting the "Genes" option will bring up a page
through which a research may create new genes by specifying various
properties. See the Inscribe User Guide for more details.

Please send all comments and questions to info@biologicinstitute.org.