README for pd external package 'pdstring'
Last updated for pdstring v0.06
The 'pdstring' package contains objects for converting to and from (ASCII)-strings, represented as lists of floats.
Issue the following commands to the shell:
cd PACKAGE-XX.YY (or wherever you extracted the distribution)
./configure
make
make installThe 'configure' script supports the following options, among others:
--help
Output a brief usage summary of the 'configure' script, including a list of supported options and influential environment variables.
--enable-debug , --disable-debug
Whether to enable verbose debugging messages. Default=no.
PD by Miller Puckette and others.
Ideas, black magic, and other nuggets of information drawn from code by Guenter Geiger, Larry Troxler, and iohannes m zmoelnig.
Encoding each byte of a string as its own float is shamefully wasteful: it uses only 1 byte out of at least 3 which could be losslessly used given ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 floats, not to mention the remaining byte(s) (usually 1) of the float itself or the (usually 4) bytes used for the a_type flag. Unfortunately, Pd trims some floating point precision in message boxes and in float atoms, so a truly lossless float encoding for Pd would only be possible using 2 bytes per float (wasting 1/2 the space of the float itself), and (to me), the memory saving such an encoding would provide is just not worth the lack of transparency and additional workload it would involve (but contact me if you want the code anyways).
Bryan Jurish <[email protected]>