Simon Huggins <huggie@earth.li>

Sigs are essentially just text files with special characters inside them.

There are two (ish) types of special characters:
	- those that just get substituted
	- those that get padded and aligned

For a full definition of reserved letters and macros that can exist please
read MACRO_DESCRIPTION.  Yeah, I know there is overlap but this file is
meant to help you write sigs and MACRO_DESCRIPTION is meant to be an
authoritative reference file.

See the end for the examples which are probably more interesting.

Straight substitutions
======================

	Becomes
@B	A newline.  This is a bit pointless for sigs - why have a macro to
	insert a newline when you can just put one in yourself?
	It's useful for taglines.
@F	First name of person in To: line.
@L	Last name of person in To: line.
@N	Whole name of person in To: line.
@V	Version of htag.pl (format x.y.z i.e. 0.0.17)

Padding and Aligning
====================

Ok, substitutions of this sort are done to a set number of characters.

They are of the form:
@[A-Za-z]?[1-9][0-9]*[RC]?@

That is:
	- An @ symbol
	- An optional letter
		* If it's not there it means insert a bit of the tagline
		  you've selected (multiple ones of these are replaced with
		  multiple sections of tagline)
		* If it does exist it means insert a bit of the plugin that
		  deals with that particular letter (multiple ones of these
		  are replaced each time with a new line from the plugin)
	- A number
		* This is the exact number of characters that will be
		  inserted.
	- An optional alignment
		* R for right padded with spaces
		* C for centered padded with spaces
		* Nothing for left aligned padded with spaces on the right.
	- An @ symbol


What this all means
===================

It's probably best shown with examples:

@40@ means insert 40 characters of the tagline chosen left aligned.
@64R@ means right align over 64 characters part of the tagline.


@20R@ @20@ means right align 20 characters of tagline and then put a space
and then left align another 20.

With letters:

@U20@ means print in 20 characters the output of the uptime plugin
(depending on the settings in htrc this is normally of the form:
up 23 days, 3:41)

@U1@ means give me an error message because I didn't give it enough space to
put the uptime in.

Here is one of my sigs:

-- 
UK based domain, email and web hosting ***/ @28R@ /*
http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/     **/ @28R@ /**
sales@blackcatnetworks.co.uk           */ @28R@ /***
Black Cat Networks                     / @28R@ /****

It just sticks the tagline inside the slanty bit right aligned.

And another:

-- 
Just another wannabie | @30C@ |  Just another fool
----------------------+ @30C@ +-------------------
This message was brought to you @S30@.
htag.pl @V -- http://www.earth.li/projectpurple/progs/htag.html

This puts the tagline in the middle over two lines and centers it.  It
replaces S30 with by the letter A and the number 1 where A and 1 are
randomly chosen letters using the sesame plugin and it replaces @V with the
current version of htag.pl

Hope that helped a bit.
Send me any good sigs that you write :)