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BANNER2.LZH
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VBAN.DOC
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1986-10-14
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VBAN - PROGRAM TO PRINT VERTICAL BANNERS
DESCRIPTION:
This program prints large banners on almost any printer. The input
string is printed out one letter per page oriented so that the output
banner hangs vertically. It does not use the internal character font
of the PC, but instead each letter is stored in a 72 X 57 binary array
stored in dataset ALPHA.DAT. This file must be present for the program
to work! The advantage of the external character font is elimination
of the "blocky" effect of enlarging the PC's internal character set.
The disadvantage is a rather limited character set. Any printer that
is at least 80 columns wide and obeys ASCII form feeds will work fine.
USE:
Make sure that both "VBAN.EXE" and "ALPHA.DAT" are in the default drive.
Enter "VBAN".
The first prompt asks for your input string. Allowed characters are
A-Z, 0-9, |*.?$ and %. Other characters will print as blank pages.
Lower case is accepted but will print in upper case.
The second prompt requests a fill character. This is the character
that will be used to build the letters. Any character on the
keyboard will work. Characters above 127 ASCII can be entered with
the <Alt> and the numeric keypad. For example, <Alt>252 generates
a dense black rectangle on an HP LaserJet, which produces a very
high contrast banner. Remember to hold the <Alt> key down while
entering the decimal ASCII equivalent of the character you want
on the numeric keypad. Some special characters will cause certain
printers to go bananas, so watch it! If no fill character is entered,
A will be built from A's, B from B's, etc.
BORING DETAILS:
I wrote this program about 10 years ago to drive a mainframe line
printer. The original was in Fortran. Just for fun I downloaded
it and converted it to Basic.
Since the Basic program does a lot of string manipulation, the
interpreted version is slow. The compiled version will drive even
a laser printer at a good clip. If you want to run the interpreted
version, remember to specify a maximum record length of at least
513 bytes (BASICA /S:513).
Written by Dave Grebe on: ??/??/??
Converted to Basic on: 10/13/86