HFISCHER%USC-ECLB@sri-unix.UUCP (09/29/83)
I have been using APL for a while to generate medium res-mode graphics, and artificially creating characters, graphically, to get up to eighty (proportionally spaced) characters in the medium res mode (which with IBM's APL gives one red-cyan-white 80x24 screens). A few characters are wider, such as M and W, and I didn't make any lower case (but did make some mapping symbols). It's fine for prototyping map graphics, but not as pretty as real honest 8x8 bit characters. (The squishy characters are average of 3x7 pixels, but readable.) In the hires mode one should be able to make a font with nice looking proportional characters a little wider on the average, and easily fit 132 on a screen line, using the same program, but I have not tried it yet. In the hi res mode I doubt that you will be readable easily with the 43 mil dot pitch of IBM's RGB monitor, but should have no problems with the Princeton, or with a monochrome monitor emulating graphics with a non-IBM board. The font editor is 16 APL lines long, and quite similar to how Fancy Font characters appear while editing them (but, no attempt at compatability). (It should not be hard to take Fancy Font's Hershey editor and do some neat stuff in this department for on-screen characters.) The incredible part is that the write routine to take a character string and pixel-ize it and write it anywhere on the screen has only eight executable APL statements. That's enought to turn die-hard C hackers looking inquisitively at APL. Of course, APL is slow hacking at bits, but maybe some pressure on IBM could spiff up their implementation, or I could give up and write the routine as an assembler language shared variable handler (which seems not too hard, but it already works as is). That's a long winded answer to the query about writing more than eighty characters across unaltered hardware, or alternatively how to write eighty characters on a graphics mode (pixel formatted) screen in living colors! Herm Fischer -------