Preview a page

A how-to guide: draw one frame of a service without ringing it up, at the terminal or as a web page.

At the terminal

uv run sextile render calendar_viewdata:app --page 3

render fetches the page and draws one frame of it to standard output, its keys to standard error. --page is the number; --frame picks a later frame of a page that runs to several (the first, 0, by default). --form chooses how:

--form

what it draws

ansi (default)

colour, as the Beeb would draw it, for a terminal

grid

the character and attribute layers, for a drawing fault

bytes

the wire stream, as a hex dump

html

a self-contained web page (below)

As a web page

uv run sextile render calendar_viewdata:app --page 3 --form html > month.html

--form html writes a whole page: the Bedstead font embedded, the stylesheet inlined, and the frame. It opens from disk with no server, and names the page number in its <title>. This is the same rendering the documentation uses, and a page in its own right — for sending someone a frame to look at.

In the documentation

A frame in a doc is drawn with the sextile-frame directive rather than pasted, so it is the frame the code produces at build time. See Contributing for its two forms. The full option list for both subcommands is Command line, and what bytes and grid mean on the wire is in Viewdata encoding.