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ShowFont 4.0 © 1989 by Arthur Johnson Jr. ========================================= Last update date - 07/12/89 --------------------------- ********************************************************************** * To see just the changes since revision ?.?, check out the improved * * "Revisions n' Updates" section at the end of this documentation! * ********************************************************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This program, source files, and documentation (wow) are all Copyright 1989 by myself. The .info file was supplied by the nice people at AmigoTimes, so that's still public domain. This program may be freely distributed, as long as the program, source, and docs are always packaged together. If you would like to include ShowFont on a commercial product, get in contact with me by mail/phone and tell me about it. I like to know where ShowFont is going! ;) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ShowFont -------- This program allows you to quickly and painlessly view all 256 characters in a typical font. I wrote it because using FontEd or (choke!) NotePad to see what a font looks like can be slow, tedious, monotonous, etc. To call this program from Workbench, double-click on its icon. To call this program from the CLI, type: ShowFont [font_name] [font_size] [font_style] <RETURN> [font_name] (Topaz, Ruby, etc.), [font_size] (8, 12, etc.), and [font_style] (Underlined, Bold, Italics, Extended - use the first letters) are purely optional. If you do not specify a size, ShowFont will check all your available fonts and then show you what sizes/styles of the font you wanted exist. If don't give a style, ShowFont will try to find the "normal" style of the font size you want. If you omitted the font, you can select what font/size/style to see by using the font requester. The Font Requester ------------------ So, what's the font selector like? Well, I've tried to make it pretty standard, including all the neat features most of the better ones have. To select a font, size, or style, simply click on it with the left button. When you have the desired font, size, and style selected, press the OK button. You can also just double-click on the font, size, or style to do the same thing. To scroll around the font, size, and style lists, click on the arrows or slider gadgets. Since you've most likely used their like in other programs, you probably already know what they do. Note that you can hold down the left button over these gadgets and the list will scroll rapidly in the direction of the arrow you're over. You can also do this with the slider gadget and move up and down to scroll over the whole list. To stop the scrolling, release the button. If you decide you really don't want to look at a different font than what you had been checking out, press the CANCEL button. /**************************************************************************/ /* Because most everyone changes their Preferences colors, the */ /* colors I mention below might not be correct for your system. Just */ /* translate what the colors should be on your system (if you've changed */ /* them). The original colors were blue, white, black, and orange (in */ /* order of how you can change them in Preferences). Just look to see */ /* what your colors are where and things should be pretty easy to */ /* understand. Then again, they may not. */ /**************************************************************************/ If the sizes of the font you've selected are printed in WHITE, the font is non-proportional (TOPAZ). If they are printed in ORANGE, they are proportional (most everything else). I added this so you can easily see what fonts you may have are non-proportional, since they are real nice when trying to make tables and stuff that needs to be columnarly [sic?] organized. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, non-proportional fonts take up the same number of pixels per character, i.e., an 'i' takes as much space as an 'm'. Proportional fonts space the characters according to how wide they are, i.e., an 'i' would definitely take less space to write than an 'm'. Don't know what a pixel is? Pixels are the small dots that can be seen if you press your face to your terminal screen. What's a terminal screen? Well, etc., etc. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The above explanation is a perfectly good RECURSIVE DEFINITION example. But anyway, back to the documentation. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Note that if you are in 2 color mode, the proportional and non-proportional size colors will be the same. Clicking CANCEL when you've just booted the program without any default font will cause the program to display TOPAZ 11 (if it exists). I don't know why it doesn't use TOPAZ 8. I've tried to tell it to many times and in many ways, but it ignores me. C'est la vie. But you would never do that anyway, would you? Someday, I'll try to track down and eliminate this one-time fault. Version 4.0 note: I will soon call this a "feature" instead of a bug... Menus ----- For a change, I think I will try to organize this documentation a bit by listing all the menus and what each selection does. If this is too orderly for you, please call and tell me and I'll try to make it more confusing next time. Menu - Option What is it? --------------------------- ----------- Project - About Gives some useless information about the program. Project - Quit Exits the program. Fonts - Change FONTS dir: To redefine the current FONTS: directory. Type in where ShowFont can find the new FONTS: directory. Examples: df1:fonts1 dh0:fonts/myfonts After you've pressed RETURN, click OK to accept the new FONTS: directory, or Cancel to leave without altering anything. Fonts - Font Selection Brings up the font selecting requester. Screen - Screen Format To change the screen size and number o' colors. Notice that all the menu options have short key-equivalents, i.e., you can press Right Amiga-? to select that menu selection, where ? is whatever letter is displayed after the neat Amiga symbol in the menu. If the font is found, ShowFont will display "font_name-font_sizefont_style" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen next to the CLOSE gadget. To see the rest of the font (if all 256 characters cannot fit on the screen at once), use the three gadgets on the right-hand side of the screen. Again, their function closely resembles their appearance. Fiddle around for about three seconds and you will be quite familiar and comfortable with scrolling around a font. Again, you can just hold down the button and scroll happily in whatever direction you like. The font_style symbols are 'u', 'b', 'i', 'e', for underlined, bold, italics, and extended, in that order. "Normal" styles won't have anything after the size number. Note that actually all 256 characters will not be displayed if there are blank (empty) characters. The program will skip them, since they are rather uninteresting, being blank. The program will display that segment of the characters that the font says should be displayed. Two-to-one someone has some neat secret graphics just outside the official display range, but we'll never know. I've added the ability to find out just how to get that neat graphics character you see. Just click on the character, and the keys to press to produce it will appear in the window title area, also, its decimal and hex codes. The alphabetic keys (A -> Z) will all be in upper-case. That does NOT mean you have to (for example), press ALT-SHIFT-A when you see 'ALT-A'. Just press the ALT and then the A keys. Only press SHIFT when it explicitly tells you to. The lowercase 's' and 'm' you might see refer to the SPACE BAR and KEYPAD MINUS (-), respectively (not sexual practices - whoops!). * NOTE * Anything telling you to press CONTROL-[ALT-]_ is suspicious, as I did not have a table for the characters from decimal 0 -> 31, and 128 -> 159. Take the "press..." advice with a grain o' salt for these characters. If some kind soul will send me a complete keymap with those values noted, I will add them. Note that CONTROL-? or CONTROL-ALT-? means that ShowFont THINKS you press CONTROL (or CONTROL-ALT) to get that character, but does not know what particular key. Sorry. Someday I'll get this fixed up. It's come to my attention that for some fonts, what ShowFont tells you to type to get a certain character is completely wrong. I think this may be because the programs using these fonts change the default keymap. I'm not really sure about this, anyone having this sort of problem please alert me about it. Escaping -------- To exit the program, click on the CLOSE gadget or select the menu "Quit" option or press Right-Amiga-Q. I like three ways to end a program! Actually, you can also end the program by: 1) Control Amiga-Amiga 2) Turning off your computer's power 3) Striking the system with great force with a large, blunt object That now makes a total of six ways to terminate the program. I'm sure clever people will find even more imaginative and useful ways to end the font session. Summary? -------- I guess the best advice I can give you for using and understanding this program is to type 'showfont' from CLI and fiddle around for a while until you either comprehend all the features or delete the program in a fit o' passion. In fact, most bugs are detected this way through random menu and gadget selecting. I'll apologize now for this rather random and odd documentation file, but I'm usually dazed and confused after my program successfully runs without any apparent bugs. On a technical note, the Lattice 5.2 C "big" compiler and global optimizer compiled this program without comment. I like that. I used the following to compile the program: lc -g -L -M -O showfont sfstructs fixhunk showfont Thank You's ----------- National Type Foundry, for sending me two font packages. AmigoTimes, for the complimentary magazine issue (& icon). John R. Vig, for his continued interest in the program. J. K. Levie, for his instructional 'defdisk.c' source. ...and anyone else who just needs/wants a 'Thank You!' How to Locate the Author ------------------------ That's it! Any comments/questions/suggestions/flames/improvements/etc., can be directed to the following address: ***************************** * Arthur Johnson Jr. * * 225 Montego Bay Court * * Merritt Island, FL 32953 * * (407) 277-0548 * ***************************** Arthur Johnson Jr. -=> {uiucuxc, hoptoad, petsd}!peora!rtmvax!bilver!alj -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- -=> alj@bilver.UUCP -=> PLink: DUNG -=> GEnie: A.JOHNSONJR I don't frequent the message bases on PLink or GEnie, so E-MAIL me on those two systems. Revisions n' Updates -------------------- Version 4.0 : Added an error requester to inform you of certain recoverable errors instead of exiting the program disgracefully. Told ShowFont how to handle font sizes with multiple styles nicely. Included the ability to change the FONTS: dir from inside ShowFont. Currently, when you leave the program, FONTS: will still be pointing to wherever you told ShowFont to look for it. Now you can change the number of colors the screen has, for color font support sometime in the future. And, two-color screens really haul when scrolling around! Moved the "To get that key..." information to the title bar, and included the key codes for my own obscure purposes. Version 3.3 : Fixed a bug that caused ShowFont to lump similarly-named fonts together (whoopsie!). Added "To get that character, press..." feature. Version 3.2 : Eliminated slider gadgets happy post-release flickering. Returned a satisfactory response to the system when exiting from a RUN-ned ShowFont, exterminating that error message. Polished the code up quite a lot for some noticeable speed and size improvements. Worked on the documentation some more (this will be assumed for all future versions) Discarded the somewhat useless and potentially dangerous "Read FONTS:" menu option. A few other little thingies. Version 3.1 : Fixed a bug in the 'Read FONTS:' menu selection. Added "double-clicking" selection method. Cleaned up the documentation a bit. Version 3.0 and below : These records were destroyed in the great fire, earthquake, plague, hurricane, tsunami, volcanic eruption, insect infestation, computer virus, meteorite strike, supernova, tornado, and alien attack of 1988. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.