Re: No more vDos worlds left to conquer

["Carl Distefano" cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Wengier W"  (Redacted
sender "wengierwu" for DMARC) Sat, 6 Aug 2016 12:33:22 +0000 (UTC)

> The problem with a small font is mainly that I cannot seem to find
> the menu option for it, e.g. under "Format" -> "Type Style" in
> Xy4. I can find styles like "Superscript" and "Subscript", but
> there seems to be no "Small font" at all. How can I set small font
> in XyWrite?

Wengier, you're right, there is no "small font" option. Text modes,
such as bold, superscript, subscript, etc., have mnemonics (BO, SU, SD,
etc.), and these mnemonics are assigned to decimal color modes in a
printer file (SETTINGS.DFL in Xy4). So, for example, in the printer
file you might assign:

MD NM=7
MD UL=3
MD BO=15

And then in your document you would embed MoDe commands , ,
and , respectively (command, e.g., MD BO on the command line), to
invoke these attributes. Note that, on the screen, , , and
 (command, e.g., MD 15) would produce the same colors. The
internal, default assignments follow the usual DOS pattern of
background, foreground hex pairs. So mode 0 (00h) is the background
text color, mode 7 (07h) is foreground text color, mode 15 (0Fh) is
boldface, etc.

I can imagine a couple of ways to create a "small font/big font" option
in XyWrite. One possibility is to use mnemonic modes that are not
normally used for printing; for example MoDe RV (reverse video) for
"small" and MoDe BR (bold reverse) for "big". In config.txt, you'd set
screen fonts for these with something like SMALFONT=fontname;
LARGFONT=fontname; and in XyWrite you would invoke these fonts by
embedding  or  in the document. (These may not be good
choices, however, since RV and BR are sometimes used for italics and
bold italics in Xy3, which doesn't have mnemonic modes for these
attributes.) Another way would be to use numbered modes. So, in vDos-
lfn, perhaps 04 would be "small" and 05 would be "big". In config.txt,
you would again set screen fonts for these with SMALFONT=fontname;
LARGFONT=fontname; and in XyWrite you would invoke these fonts by
embedding  or  in the document. (I'm putting aside the
question of how these "small" or "big" fonts would look when printed.)

That still leaves the question of what screen fonts to use for
SMALFONT= and LARGFONT=. I'm not sure there are any satisfactory
options here -- maybe Jordan has one. Maybe the solution is not to
assign different fonts to "small" and "big", but to transform (squash
or stretch) the letter shape of the main (FONT=) font. But I don't know
if this is feasible.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx