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FONTEDIT.DOC
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1994-05-10
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The Font Editor
---------------
by Dario Vlah
1. Introduction
---------------
The basic purpose of the Font Editor is, as its name suggests, editing
of fonts. The fonts that are in this case referred to are the screen
fonts, which are used to display characters on the screen in text mode
of the display adapters. It is very easy to use the program, since all
editing is done with a mouse. The user-friendly interface makes working
with the editor trivial even for a first-time user.
The fonts produced with the editor can be loaded in memory to be used
instead of the default screen font. The font will stay that way in most
of the text-mode based programs as many editors, DOS - commands,
programming language editors (like any Turbo or Borland Pascal or C,
Quick Basic, and many, many others) etc.
2. Usage
--------
a) The Editor
-------------
There are some aspects of the editing that need to be explained. The
main (and the only for now) screen consists of a large editing area on
the left side, and many buttons all around the screen. Those are all
described in this section.
* The editing area
The editing area represents a single character. Its size is 8x16
dots. A blue rectangle represents a dot (foreground of the
character), and a white rectangle represents the background of the
character. To edit these, mouse is used. A press on the left button
on the mouse will toggle a pixel, and movement will set/reset all
the pixels the mouse cursor goes over. The editing is very
intuitive, and can be learned quickly.
* Real Size Char / Double Size Char
In these areas, you can see how will your character actually look on
the screen in its real size. The double size is provided for
convenience. These images change interactively while editing.
* Save / Load buttons
These buttons are used to save and load a character set to/from disk
* Exit font editor
Exits font editor without asking questions - convenient because it
doesn't annoy you by asking Y/N, but dangerous because you can
accidently exit the program and destroy minutes of work!
* Define character set
This option is a little bit harder to understand. When a character
set is activated, usually all 256 characters are changed. However,
if you only edited letters "A" to "C" because you don't like them
the way they are, you can tell the program, when it activates the
character set, to activate only 3 of the 256 characters. You do that
by using this option. It will ask you "FIRST ASCII CODE" and "LAST
ASCII CODE". "FIRST" means at which character does a range start,
and "LAST" means at which character does the range end. For the
above three characters, you would enter 65 for "FIRST", and 67 for
"LAST ASCII CODE". Presently, only one range can be input, but I
plan to add an interactive character selector in the new version
(which I'll finish somewhen in May '94)
* Get ROM Charset
The default ROM character set will be loaded to the editor after you
answer Y(es) to the query. Careful! Your current work will be
overwritten!
* Clear Character
Clears the editing area
* Invert Character
Toggles every pixel in the editing area. What is black (that is,
blue) becomes white and vice versa.
* Undo Last Action
Undoes last action. Applies ONLY to a single mouse action, and
Invert/Clear character.
* Four SCROLL arrow-buttons
...will shift the character in the editing area one pixel in the
corresponding direction. Non-undoable.
* Choose button and two arrow-buttons beside it
Left/Right arrow-button will display the previous/next character of
the character set in the editing area. You can also specify a
character to be edited by clicking Choose, and inputting an ASCII
code.
Any character can be selected explicitely by pressing appropriate key
on your keyboard. I.e. pressing Shift-A will show you "A", pressing [
will show "[", pressing Esc will show "" and so on...
This is pretty much everything that has to be explained about the
editor.
b) The Command Line
-------------------
The way to activate a character set is by specifying its name on the
command line. Example:
FEDIT MYOWN
Here, MYOWN is the name under which you previously saved your custom
character set. The editor puts an .CHS extension to every character set
file.
By typing the above command, the characters in the range you specified
with the "DEFINE CHARSET" option (or all of them by default) are going
to be changed, and you'll immediately see the effect on the screen.
Few example fonts are provided so you can play with them a bit.
3. The requirements
-------------------
The program will work properly on all VGA and better cards. Program
will also work on EGA cards, but the bottom part of the editor will be
cut off (in the best case).
Also, the editor won't run without a mouse, although I might change
this in future versions.
4. What next...
---------------
If you like the program, REGISTER IT!
If you think your friend might find it useful, GIVE IT TO HIM!
Actually, feel free to spread it around (post on BBS' etc.)
If you have any comments/suggestions/questions, if you found any bugs,
or are (this is likely to happen) annoyed by something, I would really
appreciate your message.
PLEASE comment, suggest, ask, so I can know what to add in future
versions. I can be reached extremely easy:
BY SNAIL-MAIL (paper-mail):
DARIO VLAH
65 Rhodes Dr
New Hyde Park
N.Y. 11040
BY E-mail: *** the best! ***
On the great NiteLife BBS,
FIDONet Node = 1:2619/263
My name = Dario Vlah
On the famous TVRi BBS
FIDONet Node = 2:384/106
My name = still Dario Vlah
My Internet Address =
dario.vlah@263.image.linet.org
By PHONE:
My phone number(s) is/are:
+385 51 619 184 (be careful, the phone rates are unbelievable!)
+1 (516) 741 7237 U.S
That's about it! Enjoy the program!
(I'm looking forward to read your responses!)