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CD ROM Paradise Collection 4 1995 Nov.iso
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filutil
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bigtxt21.zip
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BIGTEXT.DOC
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1995-02-04
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William Luitje
4 February 1994
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Introduction ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
This program will translate your text to BIG text. It can be used
in batch files to produce messages which can be read across the
room or the output can be redirected to a file whence it can be
imported into a text or program file for use as a heading, title
or e-mail signature. The output can also be redirected to a
printer to produce a banner. It is inspired by a program called
bigecho written by Barry Simon and Richard Wilson, which
originally appeared in 1986. In the fading days of DOS it is my
pleasure to bring you an improvement to a utility which
originally appeared in DOS' youth.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Quick Start ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Run the demo batch file to see what kinds of things are possible
and then run the program with no arguments for a list of switches
and usage hints. Then, play!
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Character Styles ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
BIGTEXT supports 5 different character styles which specify the
size and orientation of the big characters. You specify which
style to use with the /Sx switch. Replace "x" with the letter of
the desired style as shown below. Each character that BIGTEXT
produces is formed by taking one or more pixels from the font
table and replacing them with one or more regular characters.
The following descriptions tell how many ordinary character rows
and columns are used to form a big character in the default CGA
font. The actual size will depend on the font used; for example,
when using the VGA 8x16 font, a character in the narrow style
will be 4 columns wide and 16 rows tall since a regular VGA
character is 8 pixels wide and 16 pixels tall .
■ Big - 8 x 8. The default style. (/SB)
■ Narrow - 8 x 4. (/SN)
■ Short - 4 x 8. (/SS)
■ Petite - 4 x 4. (/SP)
■ Vertical - 8 x 8. These are 'big' characters standing on their
sides. (/SV)
Short style has the best proportioned characters but narrow style
is useful when you want to pack up to 19 characters on an 80
column screen. Petite big characters? Well, everything is
relative! Petite style can only be used with an EGA or VGA card
and can only be viewed on the screen. If you redirect the output
to a file or printer, you won't get what you want. Obviously,
vertical style can be used to make banners.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Character Fonts ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
BIGTEXT supports an almost unlimited number of fonts which can be
used with any of the above styles. Specify which font to use
with the /Fx switch replacing "x" with the value for the font you
want to use. BIGTEXT does not contain any font definitions. It
uses definitions from 3 possible sources: 1) the system or E/VGA
ROM BIOS, 2) screen fonts which have been installed into the
Alternate Character Set Override Table of the Video Save Table,
and 3) the currently displayed screen font.
The default font is CGA (/FC) which should be available on all
PCs, even those with monochrome display cards. This font uses an
8x8 pixel array but does not include character definitions for
characters above the delete character (hex 7F); these include the
Greek letters and line drawing characters. If you have an EGA or
VGA card in your system, BIGTEXT can use it to make any IBM
character using an 8x8 (/FE) or 8x14 (/F4) matrix. The 8x8 EGA
character definitions may differ slightly from the CGA ones and
you may like them better. If you have a VGA card, an 8x16 (/F6)
font is also available. BIGTEXT does not check to see that you
have the proper hardware when you ask for one of these latter
fonts so you can expect garbage if you don't have the right
equipment.
In addition, BIGTEXT can use EGA or VGA screen fonts (/FS) to
produce characters. Screen fonts are typically 4k or so TSRs
which install a non-standard font when run. When the "screen"
font is selected, BIGTEXT downloads the definition of the font
which is currently being displayed on the screen from the video
card and uses it to produce big characters.
When the "alternate" font is selected (/FA), BIGTEXT uses the
font definition from the Alternate Character Set Override Table.
For a screen font to work with this font mode of BIGTEXT, it must
have definitions for all 256 characters, load the font into
system RAM and place a pointer to the font in the Alternate
Character Set Override Table which is found from the Video Save
Table. One advantage of this font selection method is that the
font does not have to be visible to be used for making big
characters, just properly installed. For example, you might want
to use an old English font to produce a banner but not want to
use it for your normal display font. Even though this is the
method established by the original IBM VGA BIOS for installing
screen fonts, many screen fonts don't use it. In this case you
can always use the "screen" font option.
With these last two font selections you can make big characters
in various novelty fonts and even non-Latin character sets like
Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic. For use with BIGTEXT, I have uploaded
the file NVLTFNTS.ZIP to the screen directory of the SIMTEL
archive (if you have FTP access to the internet, this can be
found at the mirror site, oak.oakland.edu. in /pub/msdos/screen).
This file contains a collection of 12 screen fonts which are
suitable for use with BIGTEXT in either "screen" or "alternate"
font modes. Some of the fonts included are old english, script,
small capitals, OCR and computer. If you are really into screen
fonts, check out the file fntcol16.zip in the same directory. It
has over 200 (!) screen fonts which are compatible with the
loader in NVLTFNTS. There are other font packages in the screen
and vga directories of the SIMTEL archive. There are even screen
font editors (I'd recommend EVAFONT) if you are inclined to
design your own!
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Bricks ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
By default, BIGTEXT uses IBM block characters as the bricks used
to build the big characters. Obviously, this is not desirable if
you want to e-mail your big text or print it on a printer which
can only print ASCII characters so BIGTEXT provides two ways to
specify which characters to use to build big and vertical styles.
You can specify the character used either by giving examples of
the characters to use for the foreground and background (/C) or
numerically (/N) which is useful for specifying the PC's non-
ASCII characters. To use the /C switch just follow it with the
character to use for the foreground and optionally background.
For straight ASCII text *, # and [ are popular. When using the
graphics character set many nice effects can be produced by using
the shaded block or line drawing characters. One nice effect is
to have blank letters against a patterned background. Since you
can't specify a blank foreground directly (because that would
terminate the switch specification) use the character whose
numeric value is 255; it always displays as blank.
However, note that MS-DOS and the console driver will filter some
characters out, e.g. < and ESC. Characters which are filtered
out by the command line interpreter such as "<" can be produced
for output with the /N switch. For example, /N60 will produce
output composed of "<" characters. ESC, which displays as a left
arrow, is filtered on the output side as well as the input side
so you can't use that symbol to build text bound for a file (but
if you use the attribute command you can display it on the
screen).
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Really Big Characters ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
If the big character style is not big enough for you, BIGTEXT
allows you to 'magnify' the output by up to a factor of 9 by
using the /Mvh switch. "v" specifies the vertical magnification
and "h" the horizontal. If you use the 8x16 VGA font, the result
can be letters which are each up to 72 by 144 characters. Using
vertical style and a printer which has 14" wide paper, you can
make very conspicuous banners. Also, since it is possible to
specify the horizontal and vertical magnification separately, you
can adjust the aspect ratio of the output. Magnification is only
available with the 'big' and 'vertical' styles.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Colors ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
If the output is being sent to the screen, you can specify the
screen attributes BIGTEXT uses to display your text with the /Ab
switch where "b" is the screen attribute setting expressed in
binary. For a color video adapter (i.e. CGA, EGA or VGA) the
attribute bits have the following meanings:
Attribute Bits: 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
Foreground Blink ┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ └ Foreground Blue
Background Red ──┘ │ │ │ │ └── Foreground Green
Background Green ────┘ │ │ └──── Foreground Red
Background Blue ──────┘ └────── Foreground Intensity
Setting a bit to one enables that color or attribute. You can
build colors by setting more than one color bit. For example, to
display blinking yellow text on a blue background, you would use
/A10011110. This switch is available for all styles but forces
the output to the screen (i.e. no redirection to a file).
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Other Features ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
■ BIGTEXT places a newline character at the end of each line (and
still manages to put 10 big or short characters on a 'line')
where bigecho used the BIOS' screen wrap feature. This means
that when you capture the output to a file you don't have to do
a lot of tedious editing to get usable text.
■ BIGTEXT can echo a string starting with '/' (which is normally
the switch character), just double it and only one will be
echoed.
■ To include leading, trailing or embedded spaces in your text
(for example, to center your text), enclose your text in "s.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Bugs ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
At this time, I know of no bugs in BIGTEXT but there are some
things which can go wrong. I have only tested it on a few
different kinds of VGA cards and since the ability to read screen
fonts depends on a deep level of compatibility with the VGA
standard; it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't work with some
cards. As mentioned before, BIGTEXT does not check for the
presence of appropriate hardware before using EGA or VGA
features; this can cause lots of garbage to be echoed. Some
screen fonts install special INT 10 handlers which ensure that
the font remains loaded in all eventualities. This can cause the
E/VGA BIOS fonts to become unavailable. And finally, if the
lines produced are too wide to fit on your screen, the BIOS will
wrap them causing the big character patterns to be jumbled.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Technical Information ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
How does it work? In the old days when the Color Graphics
Adapter was designed, it seemed like a good cost-saving idea to
use the BIOS ROM to store the character matrices used for the
graphics character set rather than going to the expense of
increasing the size of the ROM chip on the CGA board. To this
day, every BIOS, even for the latest Pentium, has stored in it a
CGA character array! BIGTEXT simply uses this array to generate
big characters, substituting a character for every dot in the
array. Hence, any CGA graphics character, from the smiley face
to the delete character 'house', can be produced by BIGTEXT. EGA
and VGA cards also store their character matrices in their BIOS
ROMs where they can be read and used by BIGTEXT.
Narrow and short characters are formed similarly but by using the
thick border characters to produce two dots, either horizontally
or vertically, with a single character. Petite style uses a
single character to display two pixels both horizontally and
vertically. But since the ordinary IBM border characters don't
provide enough patterns, some of the line drawing characters are
redefined to provide the missing patterns. That's why you must
have an EGA or VGA card to use the petite style and why you can't
print or save the results.
By using existing character definitions, BIGTEXT can produce
several neat effects with a very small program.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Registration ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Another thing that is similar to bigecho is that, while this
software may be freely copied and used, it is being distributed
as POSTWARE. I am curious about where in the world this little
utility will travel so, if you use it, please send me a postcard
(preferably a local picture postcard). If that is too much
trouble, send me some e-mail. If even that is too much trouble,
do yourself a favor and take some time off to go for a walk in a
forest or park!
Postware really works! Check out the list of features I was
motivated to think up and add in version 2.0 thanks to all of the
cards and messages I received for version 1.0. Thanks, and keep
'em coming!
William Luitje
2677 Wayside Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 USA
Internet: luitje@m-net.arbornet.org
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ Distribution ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The BIGTEXT program and its associated documentation and
demonstrations are copyrighted works of William Luitje. The
author grants you a non-exclusive license to copy and distribute
these works as long as they are distributed as a group and are
not modified in any way.
On a related note, I am distributing this program for free. If
you paid money for a floppy or CD-ROM with this program on it be
aware that I am not seeing a penny of it. What you paid for is
the service of distribution. I'm sure that you understand the
nature of transactions like that but I have heard from people who
"bought one of my programs" and expect me to conduct a
correspondence course on basic PC techniques and theory because
of their "purchase". While I am always open to bug reports and
well thought out questions (and postcards!), please read the
documentation carefully and check with local experts before you
fire up your word processor.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│▒▒▒ History ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Version 1.0 Nov 1993
Released as wvlecho with 3 styles and 1 font
Version 2.0 Feb 1994
Renamed to bigtext
Added petite and vertical styles
Added support for E/VGA, screen and alternate fonts
Added magnification feature for really big text
Version 2.1 Feb 1995
Added /A for colors & blinking effects on screen
Copyright 1995 by William Luitje
