'-------------------------------------------------------------'
' HTCConverter Readme                                         '
' Written by Christophe Fontanel                              '
'                                                             '
' Please visit The Dungeon Master & Chaos Strikes Back        '
' Encyclopaedia at http://dmweb.free.fr/ for more information '
'-------------------------------------------------------------'


Some notes about creating your own Hints files
----------------------------------------------

The Hint Oracle user interface can only display up to 7 hints. If you associate too much hints to the same location, some of them will not be accessible.
Each page on screen can contain 12 lines of text, each line containing around 30 characters. If your page contains too much characters, you won't be able to see them all.

The .HTC files released by FTL do not include more than 256 hints, but it is indeed possible to declare more hints. There may be some limits to the number of hints, the number of locations or the total size of the file, but I don't know these limits.
I don't know the maximum number of pages. I tried 64 small pages, and it worked fine with the Amiga English Release 3 version. Chaos Strikes Back for Windows version 9.1 displayed the pages correctly, but crashed at the end.

It seems that a hint contents is limited to approximately 1024 characters (including all pages for the hint). You may have unknown results if you use too much characters.

HTCConverter does not perform many checks while reading a text file. You have to carefully respect the file format to avoid errors.
The easier method is to convert a .htc file to .txt and keep the exact same format.


Character set
-------------

Here is the character support of the Atari ST and the Amiga English Release 1 versions of the Hint Oracle:
	0-9 A-Z a-z and space
	"#$%&'()*+,-.:;<=>?@[\]^_{|}~
	The slash "/" will not be displayed as a slash but instead is used as carriage return.
	The "`" character is not displayed (displayed as a space).
	ASCII characters from 127 to 255 are displayed as underscore characters.

The Amiga English Release 3 version is able to display the "`" character, as well as characters in range 127-255, in order to support French and German characters. Some of these characters are displayed as runes.
