This group of filters serves no utilitarian purpose but is nonetheless quite amusing and hence should be maintained for posterity. These programs are maintained by Mark Lindner (mark_a_lindner@yahoo.com). The original authors of these programs are listed in the file `AUTHORS'. If you are the author of one of these programs and do not wish to have it distributed in this package, contact the maintainer immediately. These filters are provided for amusement only. No racial or societal slurs are intended. Some of these filters contain vulgarity, and thus are inappropriate for some audiences. If you find something offensive in one or more of these filters, please do not flame me or ask me to censor or remove the filter(s) in question. Requests of this type will be silently ignored. Note that I am only the package maintainer; I am NOT the author of the translation rules in the filters (with the exception of the `wrap' filter). These filters are not guaranteed to be idempotent across all inputs; that is, repeated applications of a given filter on an input may cause the output to differ each time. Moreover, some of the filters use randomization techniques so a given input is not guaranteed to produce the same output across invocations. You no longer need to have `flex' (or any other lexer program, for that matter) to build and use this package. However, you *will* need a lexer (specifically, `flex') to recompile if you change any `.l' files. The GAIM plugin is no longer distributed with TalkFilters, as it's now part of a separate project, "Gaim Plugin Pack", which can be found here: http://guifications.sourceforge.net/PluginPack/ The package may be built on Windows using either the MinGW environment, or Visual Studio C++ 2005, Visual Studio.NET 2005, or later. Mark Lindner November 1, 2006.