Msg: Re: No more vDos worlds left to conquer

Some more clues emerge from a very poorly remembered old installation of Xy-3:

This is excerpted from a rather customized HP laser (must be II, because I don't think I had an LJ-4 until a few years later) PRN file:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

;
PT=95
MD NM+HV050BPN
;5 pt. Helv. Bold -- alt. to Tinyfont
;
PT=96
MD NM+LG140R10
MD BO+LG140R10+BOLD
MD UL+LG140R10+UNDERLINE
;14pt. Letter Gothic Landscape
;
PT=97
MD NM+LG120B12
MD UL+LG120B12+UNDERLINE
;12pt. Letter Gothic ®MDRV¯Bold®MDNM¯ - Landscape
;
PT=98
MD NM+12LG-BOLD
;
PT=99
MD NM+TINYFONT
;TO THIS POINT THERE ARE 96 MD ENTRIES - WE CAN ONLY HAVE 4 MORE
;Evidently there is some total of MD and AT entries that I have exceeded.
;®MDRV¯ ATTRIBUTE DEFINITIONS: ®MDNM¯
;

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wengier, this must seem really ancient and arcane to you, but even now to many of us who go back to the far mists of Xy II+, on floppy disk ! I struggle to parse the workings of this now myself. Did I even tailor that PRN file myself ? Can't recall now, but I tend to doubt it. During that period I was working for someone who had a tremendously better grasp of all this stuff -- down to XPL, customizing fonts, and manipulating whole pages of raw HP PCL -- than I ever did.

Jordan

From: J R FOX
To: "xywrite@xxxxxxxx"
Sent: Saturday, August 6, 2016 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: No more vDos worlds left to conquer

I believe I've probably found the item I was thinking of -- in an old Xy3 directory -- although I can't recall in exactly what way we may have been using it. Something via the PT tables for certain printers, no doubt. Can't recall where I obtained this either. I doubt it ever shipped with XyWrite, or was ever offered by XyQuest. I will attach it below, just in case.

Jordan

From: J R FOX
To: "xywrite@xxxxxxxx"
Sent: Saturday, August 6, 2016 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: No more vDos worlds left to conquer

I'm definitely going to have to search around here (on old Zip Drive cartridges, or wherever) for that TinyFont thing that I mentioned. It was kind of like the smaller text sample on that wheel the optometrist has you look at. I don't know whether it was monospaced, or otherwise adaptable, but if so it might have been something that lent itself to a "squared" notation, or the descending 2 in H2O, particularly if other font letters will appear much larger next to it. These are very minor requests, but it might be nice to have a temperature "degrees" symbol too.

I never delved much into the higher ASCII # symbols that were available in some of the Speedo fonts -- like the Copyright symbol ? -- that may have covered some of this.

Jordan

From: Harry Binswanger
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, August 5, 2016 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: No more vDos worlds left to conquer

Wengier,

Sounds very cool. But if you can do super and sub, that implies, doesn't
it, that you could do small, because these are smaller.

Then I could have my comments, on my programs, show up in a smaller font.

Regards,
Harry

>Hi Harry,
>
>Do you wish to see superscript and subscript text to be displayed visually
>in XyWrite? If you want then please try the latest vDos-lfn build (build
>2016.08.05). You can also disable the feature to display superscripts and
>subscripts visually by setting "SUBPDISP=OFF" in the config file. vDos-lfn
>for XyWrite 1.53 is not the final version of vDos-lfn. So please enjoy the
>new version.
>
>Wengier
>
>
>On Friday, August 5, 2016 12:33 PM, Harry Binswanger mailto:hb@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>
>I'm sad. I've tweaked fonts, font-styles, colors, screen position, and who
>knows what else, and it now is optimal. What to do?
>
>Regards,
>Harry
>
>
>