Spencer Kimball
eXperimental Computing Facility
University of California at Berkeley
spencer@xcf.berkeley.edu
With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), individuals have an unprecedented ability to disseminate information at little or no cost. Because of its accessibility, the flow of information on the WWW is staggering, and appears to be sustaining its incredible rate of growth. With so much competing information, presentation becomes as-or even more-important than content; visually appealing web pages are likely to attract the most attention. Script-Fu is a newly developed application which automatically creates the graphics necessary to present information compellingly. Script-Fu is designed to maximize power and flexibility and it accomplishes this goal using a three-component architecture. This architecture is composed of an image manipulation engine (for the computations necessary to create graphics), a scripting language (for precisely describing the algorithms required to create the graphics), and a facilitator/management program (for user-interface and communication between the components). This choice of components maximizes the power of Script-Fu, but in some cases lessens the accessibility. For example, the image manipulation engine, GIMP, runs only on UNIX workstations, not on Macintoshes or PCs. A fourth component, Net-Fu, solves this dilemma by providing an alternate interface to Script-Fu, making its functionality available to anyone who has access to a WWW browser application such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Using both Script-Fu and the WWW, virtually anyone can present information compellingly, and at low cost.