flowers@ucla-cs.UUCP (03/24/87)
> Some ones said in this news-group that NANSI.SYS allowes you to >create new character fonts. Well, I got NANSI.SYS and I don't see how can it >do that ... Also, Turbo Lightning uses a different font on screen. Does anyone know how that is done? Margot Flowers Flowers@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!{ucbvax|ihnp4}!ucla-cs!flowers
smvorkoetter@watmum.UUCP (03/26/87)
In article <5197@shemp.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU> flowers@CS.UCLA.EDU (Margot Flowers) writes: >> Some ones said in this news-group that NANSI.SYS allowes you to >>create new character fonts. Well, I got NANSI.SYS and I don't see how can it >>do that ... > >Also, Turbo Lightning uses a different font on screen. Does anyone >know how that is done? > >Margot Flowers Flowers@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!{ucbvax|ihnp4}!ucla-cs!flowers There would appear to be some confusion here between fonts and attributes. What the original poster (I forget who) was interested in is new fonts on the screen (eg. Times Roman, Italics, Microgamma, etc.) whereas what the above two posters are interested in are different attributes on the screen (eg. Bold, Red, Reverse, Blinking, Green, etc.). Neither NANSI nor Lightning use different fonts, nor can they. To use a different font, you either have to have a Hercules Plus type card, or an ordinary Hercules, CGA, or EGA in graphics mode. To use a different attribute is easy. T.L. does it by writing the character and attribute bytes directly into screen memory. NANSI allows you to specify escape sequences (so does ANSI.SYS) that change the active attributes. For example, my prompt on the PC that I am writing this on is set with the command PROMPT $e[1;34m$n$g $e[1;30m which stands for the characters ESC [ 1 ; 3 4 m DRIVE-LETTER > SPACE ESC [ 1 ; 3 0 m The ESC ... m sequence is the ANSI escape sequence to change attributes. As they are in the above prompt command, I get a bright blue prompt, followed by bright black (dark grey) user input (that I type). For this to work, NANSI.SYS or ANSI.SYS must be loaded. When a character is typed, the BIOS puts the appropriate character in the appropriate place in screen memory, and the currently set attributes in the byte following the character. The escape sequences are merely a convenient way to set the attributes.