---------------------------------------------------------------------- Visual Thought Preferences Last update: 10 September 1995 Confluent Technical Notes Copyright (c) 1995 Confluent, Inc. All rights reserved. Suggestions or questions to 415-586-8700 or vthought@confluent.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This technical note describes the command-line and startup preferences that can be specified for Visual Thought. Visual Thought recognizes the following preferences: background : background color used to draw dialogs encoding : enable printing of ISO-8859-1 characters above 127 font : font used to display text in dialogs foreground : foreground color used to draw dialogs informtranslators : generate messages for unavailable translator commands laf : look-and-feel used for interface appearance and behavior monochrome : use only black and white for display on monochrome monitors nosoundalert : disable alert indicating unavailable audio control device printclass : type of PostScript printer (standard or color) printcmd : command for printing PostScript documents The available preferences are described in more detail in the section "Preference Descriptions" below. Specifying Preferences ---------------------- Visual Thought preferences can be set in the following ways: 1. Modify the X server resource database (i.e., in ~/.Xdefaults or via xrdb) with an entry of the form: vthoughtx.: 2. Add arguments to the vthought command line of the form: - If a preference is specified through both the X server resource database and the command line, the value on the command line takes precedence. Some preferences can only be specified on the command line. These are noted in the section "Preference Descriptions" below. As an example, to use a 14 pt Helvetica font for dialog interface controls, either place the following in ~/.Xdefaults: vthoughtx.font: family:helvetica-size:14 or run Visual Thought with: vthought -font family:helvetica-size:14 Preference Descriptions ----------------------- Name: background Values: depends on the colors available from X - typical values are: red, green, blue, #ff0000, #00ff00, #0000ff Default: gray80 Command line: -background The background color used to draw dialogs. The color can be specified in any format recognized by the X server (e.g., "#ff0000", "red"). This preference can only be specified on the command line. Name: encoding Values: latin1, standard Default: standard X resource: vthoughtx.encoding: Command line: -encoding With a value of "latin1", characters in the ISO-8859-1 character set with codes greater than 127 are printed correctly. This is accomplished by modifying the PostScript output to change font encoding vectors from StandardEncoding to an encoding vector for the ISO-8859-1 character set. This option is typically used to enable Visual Thought to correctly print 8-bit multinational characters from European languages. This option should only be used if it is necessary to print ISO-8859-1 characters with character codes greater than 127. It may affect printing performance and could potentially fail on some printers. Name: font Values: depends on the fonts available from X - typical names are: avantgarde, bembo, bookman, charter, clean, courier, fixed, gill, helvetica, lucida, menu, new century schoolbook, palatino, rockwell, terminal, times Default: family:helvetica-size:12 Command line: -font family:-size: The font used to display text in Visual Thought dialogs. It is recommended that the font size match a font size available from the X server. Font sizes much greater than 12 can make Visual Thought dialogs difficult to use. The available fonts can be determined with xlsfonts. For example, the following will list the available medium Helvetica fonts: xlsfonts '*helvetica-medium-r-normal*' This preference can only be specified on the command line. Name: foreground Values: depends on the colors available from X - typical values are: red, green, blue, #ff0000, #00ff00, #0000ff Default: black Command line: -foreground The foreground color used to draw dialogs. The color can be specified in any format recognized by the X server (e.g., "#ff0000", "red"). This preference can only be specified on the command line. Name: informtranslators Values: on Default: X resource: vthoughtx.informtranslators: on Command line: -informtranslators If this preference is specified, informational messages are generated when format translator commands specified in the Translators file are not available. Turning informational messages on is helpful for debugging purposes when modifying the Translators file to add, change, or delete file export translators available to Visual Thought. Name: laf Values: motif, openlook, windows, cua Default: motif Command line: -laf The look-and-feel used for the Visual Thought interface appearance and behavior. This preference can only be specified on the command line. Name: monochrome Values: on Default: X resource: vthoughtx.monochrome: on Command line: -monochrome If this preference is specified, all dialogs are drawn using only black and white, with dithering used to represent gray scales in some cases. This preference should be specified when Visual Thought is being displayed on a monochrome monitor. Name: nosoundalert Values: on Default: X resource: vthoughtx.nosoundalert: on Command line: -nosoundalert If this preference is specified, no alert notice is displayed at startup if the audio control device (/dev/audioctl) cannot be opened. Turning "nosoundalert" on is useful to avoid alert notices on startup if the host machine is intended not have an audio control device, or access to the audio control device is to be restricted. Name: printclass Values: vprintPS, vprintColorPS Default: vprintPS X resource: vthoughtx.printclass: Command line: -printclass With the default value of "vprintPS", printed and Encapsulated PostScript output is generated using standard Level 1 PostScript. Color raster images (e.g., GIF images) are output using gray scales. This output is compatible with Level 1 PostScript printers. With a value of "vprintColorPS", printed and Encapsulated PostScript output is generated using Level 1 PostScript with color extensions (i.e., the colorimage operator). Color raster images (e.g., GIF images) are output in color. This output is compatible with Level 2 PostScript printers and color Level 1 PostScript printers with color extensions. This option should be used for the output of documents containing color raster images. Name: printcmd Values: lp, lpr Default: lpr X resource: vthoughtx.printcmd: Command line: -printcmd The print command used to print documents to a PostScript printer. Printing is accomplished by executing the print command after setting the PRINTER environment variable to the printer specified in the Print dialog.