[comp.sys.apollo] Reprogramming the function keys on the vt100 emulator

bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger) (07/27/88)

[tried EMail, with typical luck.  Probably of general interest anyway.]

[the poster complained, among other things, of not being able to get vt100
to use other fonts.]

I am, even as I write, looking at vt100 running with a font designed by
three people (including myself) here (it's a 6x10 font, by the way--would
anybody else find such a size useful?  it's as big as std.19l is on a 300,
when displayed on a 3000).

Anyway, what you do is to start up your first vt100 session in a direcotry
with a font called "vt100s" (in my case, this is simply a link) that 
contains the font you want the emulator to use.  Due to the weeirrd way that
vt100 now works, this will cause all further vt100 emulators in your session
(until you sigp vt100_server) to use the same font . . . note that vt100
does reverse video by merely reversing the pixels (without painting a
reversed background first), so you must create a font that has no spacing
between characters but instead has white space within all of the characters.

This in turn is an incredible pain in the rear with the stupid font editor
(no global operations at all), but it can be done.
-- 
--Brian,                     __________________________________________________
  the man from              |Brian T. Schellenberger   ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
  Babble-On                 |104 Willoughby Lane     work: (919) 467-8000 x7783
____________________________|Cary, NC   27513        home: (919) 469-9389 



-- 
--Brian,                     __________________________________________________
  the man from              |Brian T. Schellenberger   ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
  Babble-On                 |104 Willoughby Lane     work: (919) 467-8000 x7783
____________________________|Cary, NC   27513        home: (919) 469-9389 

jec@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (James E. Conley) (07/27/88)

	We thought about doing this also, but it turned out that diskless
nodes booting off of that node would end up being force to use the larger
font and some people don't like it.  You can get around this by being fancy
with variant links (vt100s --> `node_data/vt100s), but this is pretty ugly.

bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger) (07/31/88)

In article <11036@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> jec@iuvax.UUCP (James E. Conley) writes:
|
|	We thought about doing this also, but it turned out that diskless
|nodes booting off of that node would end up being force to use the larger
|font and some people don't like it.  You can get around this by being fancy
|with variant links (vt100s --> `node_data/vt100s), but this is pretty ugly.

Um, well, yes, that would be unpleasent.  But I was talking about simply 
starting up vt100 myself in a directory with such a link.  If a local font
is available with the name, vt100 will use that rather then then one in
/sys/dm/fonts.  With the way vt100 works in sr9.7, if you start up one vt100 
session and then end it, the next session will use the same font as the 
previous (now ended) session, unless you sigp the vt100_server.  (This was
done so that later vt100's fire up super-fast.)  That way, you can start up
later vt100's in any directory you want, so long as you earlier fired up one
in a directory with the "vt100s" font you want.

I start up a vt100 in such a directory in my startup_sequence.  Of course, I 
start up eight csh's in my startup sequence already (among other things), so I 
don't mind the extra time . . .

(I might note parenthetically at this point that I am a user rather than an
administrator.  I believe I'm a fairly knowledgable user, but I lack the
[moral if not technical] authority to change /sys/dm/fonts anyway.)

Also, I don't see what's so disturbing about the idea of variant links.
Of course, it would be nicer to have the links point into ~/user_data,
since that way people get the fonts they are used to if they happen to
log into another node for some reason.  Only problem is that you have to
create a default font link in the user_data for every user from then on
out . . .
-- 
--Brian,                     __________________________________________________
  the man from              |Brian T. Schellenberger   ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
  Babble-On                 |104 Willoughby Lane     work: (919) 467-8000 x7783
____________________________|Cary, NC   27513        home: (919) 469-9389