home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Magnum One
/
Magnum One (Mid-American Digital) (Disc Manufacturing).iso
/
d21
/
qwhite10.arc
/
HRAMFONT.TEC
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1990-08-16
|
4KB
|
76 lines
ID:HR Hercules Plus and InColor Card
(with RAMFONT)
Quarterdeck Technical Note
by Stan Young
DESQview 2.0 and above support the original Hercules
Monographics card both in text and graphics mode.
Hercules has two new 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 normal text character set. Since this
custom character set can appear any way the developer designs it,
it can allow for things like italics, boldface and large fonts to
be shown on the screen without going into graphics mode. There
are some speed advantages in doing this over running in bit-
mapped graphics.
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 a
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, with
WordPerfect 5.0, if you use the "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 had an exit to DOS
feature could disable and reenable RAMFONT in this fashion.
DESQview 2.+ Technical Note Page 2
HERCULES PLUS CARD and InColor CARD
(with RAMFONT)
3. If your program automatically detects RAMFONT and this
support cannot be disabled, and 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 (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 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 * * *