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HRAMFONT.TEC
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1990-08-30
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ID:HR Hercules Monographics Plus and InColor Card
(with RAMFONT)
Quarterdeck Technical Note
by Stan Young
DESQview 2.0 and above supports the original Hercules
Monographics card both in text and graphics mode.
Hercules has two cards called the Hercules Monographics Plus
Card and the InColor Card that have an additional feature that
Hercules calls "RAMFONT." While DESQview supports the cards in
the original Hercules text and graphics modes, DESQview is not
compatible with the RAMFONT feature of the cards. We have done
considerable investigation to see if we could support RAMFONT and
have consulted with the Hercules developers, but the answer seems
to be that RAMFONT is unsupportable in the sense that we support
other video standards.
The problem is that RAMFONT allows software to load a custom
character set into the card and then addresses this character set
as if addressing a normal text character set. Since this custom
character set can appear any way the developer designs it, it can
allow for italics, boldface and large fonts to be shown on the
screen without going into graphics mode. This method has some
speed advantages over running in bit-mapped graphics mode.
Unfortunately, while these cards were designed to allow
developers to load the card with fonts of their own design,
there does not appear to be any way for developers to determine
the current state of the card, read the font information that
might be stored in the card, or in any way do what we at
Quarterdeck refer to as a "save and restore" of the card. Since
this character set is global, once an application loads in one of
these custom character sets, these new characters will appear in
other application windows and DESQview menus. This can cause
information to become unreadable.
Possible solutions and work-arounds:
1. Configure your program to operate in either standard text or
Hercules Graphics (720 by 348) mode. If your application allows
you to configure the type of graphics card you are using,
selecting IBM Monochrome or Hercules Monographics (without
RAMFONT) should cause the program to operate correctly in
DESQview.
2. Put the program that uses RAMFONT into a state in which it does
not use RAMFONT before switching windows. For instance, if you
use WordPerfect 5.0's "Exit to DOS" feature before switching
windows, WordPerfect will load in the standard character set and
then reload RAMFONTs when you return to WordPerfect. Presumably,
any program that has an exit-to-DOS feature could disable and
reenable RAMFONT in this fashion.
DESQview 2.+ Technical Note Page 2
HERCULES MONOGRAPHICS PLUS CARD and InColor CARD
(with RAMFONT)
3. If your program automatically detects RAMFONT and this
support cannot be disabled, and the program has some method for
redrawing its screen, you can use the program RAMFONT.COM that
comes with the RAMFONT card in a DESQview DOS window to re-
establish the original IBM character set. To do this, you would
just type RAMFONT at the DOS prompt (this process could be
activated by a DESQview macro on the main menu). This will
restore the normal character set for DESQview and your other
programs. However, when you return to the program that uses
RAMFONT, you will find that its screen is not correct. By
hitting the keystrokes necessary to redraw the screen, you can
then re-establish RAMFONT for the program. In Microsoft Word, for
instance, you can re-establish RAMFONT by hitting CTRL-SHIFT-\.
Copyright (C) 1990 by Quarterdeck Office Systems
* * * E N D O F F I L E * * *