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BIGTEXT.DOC
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1994-02-20
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This program will translate your text to BIG text. It
can be used in batch files to produce messages which can
be read across the room or the output can be redirected
to a file whence it can be imported into a text or
program file for use as a heading, title or e-mail
signature. The output can also be redirected to a
printer to produce a banner. It is inspired by a
program called bigecho written by Barry Simon and
Richard Wilson, which originally appeared in 1986. In
the fading days of DOS it is my pleasure to bring you an
improvement to a utility which originally appeared in
DOS' youth.
Q U I C K S T A R T
Run the demo batch file to see what kinds of things are
possible and then run the program with no arguments for
a list of switches and usage hints. Then, play!
C H A R A C T E R S T Y L E S
BIGTEXT supports 5 different kinds of character styles
which specify the size and orientation of the big
characters. Each character that BIGTEXT produces is
formed by taking one or more pixels from the font table
and replacing them with one or more regular characters.
The following descriptions tell how many ordinary
character rows and columns are used to form a big
character in the default CGA font. The actual size will
depend on the font used; for example, when using the VGA
8x16 font, a character in the narrow style will be 4
columns wide and 16 rows tall since a regular VGA
character is 8 pixels wide and 16 pixels tall .
■ Big - 8 x 8. The default style.
■ Narrow - 8 x 4.
■ Short - 4 x 8.
■ Petite - 4 x 4.
■ Vertical - 8 x 8. These are 'big' characters standing
on their sides.
Short style has the best proportioned characters but
narrow style is useful when you want to pack up to 19
characters on an 80 column screen. Petite big
characters? Well, everything is relative! Petite style
can only be used with an EGA or VGA card and can only
be viewed on the screen. If you redirect the output to
a file or printer, you won't get what you want.
Obviously, vertical style can be used to make banners.
C H A R A C T E R F O N T S
BIGTEXT supports an almost unlimited number of fonts
which can be used with any of the above styles. BIGTEXT
does not contain any font definitions. It uses
definitions from 3 possible sources: 1) the system or
E/VGA ROM BIOS, 2) screen fonts which have been
installed into the Alternate Character Set Override
Table of the Video Save Table, and 3) the currently
displayed screen font.
The default font is CGA which should be available on all
PCs, even those with monochrome display cards. This
font uses an 8x8 pixel array but does not include
character definitions for characters above the delete
character (hex 7F); these include the Greek letters and
line drawing characters. If you have an EGA or VGA card
in your system, BIGTEXT can use it to make any IBM
character using an 8x8 or 8x14 matrix. The 8x8 EGA
character definitions may differ slightly from the CGA
ones and you may like them better. If you have a VGA
card, an 8x16 font is also available. BIGTEXT does not
check to see that you have the proper hardware when you
ask for one of these latter fonts so you can expect
garbage if you don't have the right equipment.
In addition, BIGTEXT can use EGA or VGA screen fonts to
produce characters. Screen fonts are typically 4k or so
TSRs which install a non-standard font when run. When
the "screen" font is selected, BIGTEXT downloads the
definition of the font which is currently being
displayed on the screen from the video card and uses it
to produce big characters.
When the "alternate" font is selected, BIGTEXT uses the
font definition from the Alternate Character Set
Override Table. For a screen font to work with this
font mode of BIGTEXT, it must have definitions for all
256 characters, load the font into system RAM and place
a pointer to the font in the Alternate Character Set
Override Table which is found from the Video Save Table.
One advantage of this font selection method is that the
font does not have to be visible to be used for making
big characters, just properly installed. For example,
you might want to use an old English font to produce a
banner but not want to use it for your normal display
font. Even though this is the method established by the
original IBM VGA BIOS for installing screen fonts, many
screen fonts don't use it. In this case you can always
use the "screen" font option.
With these last two font selections you can make big
characters in various novelty fonts and even non-Latin
character sets like Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic. For use
with BIGTEXT, I have uploaded the file nvltfnts.zip to
the screen directory of the SIMTEL archive (if you have
FTP access to the internet, this can be found at the
mirror site, oak.oakland.edu. in /pub/msdos/screen).
This file contains a collection of 12 screen fonts which
are suitable for use with BIGTEXT in either "screen" or
"alternate" font modes. Some of the fonts included are
old english, script, small capitals, OCR and computer.
There are other font packages in the screen and vga
directories of the SIMTEL archive. There are even
screen font editors (I'd recommend EVAFONT) if you are
inclined to design your own!
R E A L L Y B I G C H A R A C T E R S
If the big character style is not big enough for you,
BIGTEXT allows you to 'magnify' the output by up to a
factor of 9. If you use the 8x16 VGA font, the result
can be letters which are each up to 72 by 144
characters. Using vertical style and a printer which
has 14" wide paper, you can make very conspicuous
banners. Also, it is possible to specify the horizontal
and vertical magnification separately so you can adjust
the aspect ratio of the output. Magnification is only
available with the 'big' and 'vertical' styles.
O T H E R F E A T U R E S
Other features are that BIGTEXT places a newline
character at the end of each line (and stil