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Analog CE 6.0: Starting to use analog under Windows

This describes how to set up analog under Windows 95/NT or later. Windows 3.1 users will have to read the section on other platforms instead.

Here is the really short summary:

  1. Edit analog.cfg
  2. Run analog (a DOS window flashes up).
  3. Read Report.html

There's also a How-To written by Simon Handfield, which explains how to get started in more detail with lots of pictures.

When you've downloaded analog, and either you or your browser has unzipped it, you will find in the analog folder a configuration file called analog.cfg and the analog executable itself, as well as the Readme, the Licence and a couple of other files. There is no setup.exe: analog is already ready to run without one.

(Some unzip programs are broken, and do not create folders when they should. If you don't have a folder called lang inside the analog folder, create one and put all the files called *.lng and *.tab into it.)

There are two ways of running analog. You can either run it from Windows (by single-clicking or double-clicking on its icon, depending on your setup), or you can run it from the DOS command prompt (under Start-Programs). If you run it from Windows, it will create a DOS window to run in. When it's finished, it will produce an output file called Report.html and some graphics; and a file called errors.txt which contains any errors there might have been. The first time you run it, this will all happen almost instantly. This is not a bug. For help in interpreting the output, see What the results mean.

You can configure analog by putting commands in the configuration file, analog.cfg. Although this is less familiar to Windows users than pressing buttons etc., it's really much simpler and more flexible when you get used to it. You can edit analog.cfg using any plain text editor, for example Notepad. One command you will need straight away is 
LOGFILE logfilename    # to set where your logfile lives
The logfile must be stored locally -- analog won't use FTP or HTTP to fetch it from the internet. There's a sample logfile supplied with the program.

There are already some configuration commands to get you started in the configuration file, but there are lots of others available. You can find the most common ones in the section on basic commands later in the Readme, and you can read about all of them in the section on customising analog. There are also some sample configuration files in the examples folder.

If you run analog from the DOS command prompt, there is another way to give options, via command line arguments, given on the command line after the program name. These are just shortcuts for configuration file commands. You can use the command line arguments if you run analog from a batch file too.

If you want to compile your own version of analog (it's written in C), or just to read the source code, it's available from the analog home page. (It's the same source code for all versions).

Go to the Analog CE home page.

Stephen Turner
19 December 2004

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