forums.silverfrost.com

wahorger · Joined: 13 Oct 2014 Posts: 1255 Location: Morrison, CO, USA

Is there already a way to invoke the Windows Font Picker dialog? I have need of a user selection of the font, style type, and size. I see how when I review the MSDN description, and wondered if I just missed something in the .enh or .chm help.

Bill

DanRRight · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:20 am Post subject:

Bill,
Selection of fonts to use for %gr graphics windows it is very easy. Here is an extraction from my very old Fortran77 code. It check all existing fonts on your computer and shows you their names in a dialog. You can also pic there font size, bold/italic and with one more additional easy (but missing here) command the font color

Selection of fonts for text windows or for OpenGL windows is a different story, but also probably doable this way.

PaulLaidler · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 10:05 am Post subject:

Dan

Thank you for this very useful sample program.

I will keep it (in a simplified form) for future reference.

Here is a copy...

wahorger · Joined: 13 Oct 2014 Posts: 1255 Location: Morrison, CO, USA

Thanks, Dan and Paul,

My need is a bit "different" in that I am trying to choose a font, and imbed this into my report generator (creates a PDF), not into an existing ClearWin+ usage.

That said, I will keep this as a reference for sometime in the future.

Bill

P.S. As an aside, I have found that not all fonts in Windows have a file to be referenced (as I would need to know to embed into the PDF), these being "native" for Windows. Even if I download a free one from the Microsoft store, it doesn't appear with a file name at all!

Has anyone looked at buying fonts for use? It is quite pricey!

PaulLaidler · Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2025 10:41 am Post subject:

New options [font_pitch=p] and/or [font_set=s] have been added for listboxes and dropdown lists (%ls, %`ls and %el). These automatically populate a list with the names of available fonts.

p has the value 1 for fixed pitch, 2 for variable pitch or 3 for both.
s has the value zero for the ANSI character set or 2 for the symbol character set. Other values of s, in the range 128 to 238, denote various language sets.

The arguments, named 'items' and 'num_items' are not required and must be omitted in this context.

The number of items shown in a dropdown list is limited, first by the supplied value of m (in %`m.nls) and then by the vertical height of the display screen. As a result, a dropdown list cannot be used when there are a large number of fonts available because some items will not be displayed.

wahorger · Joined: 13 Oct 2014 Posts: 1255 Location: Morrison, CO, USA

I will enjoy trying this feature out on the next release, or partial release(?).

Bill

PaulLaidler · Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2025 11:21 am Post subject:

Bill

In order to make full use of the new options you will need interfaces to some new functions and subroutines; this means new include or mod files for ClearWin+. I may be able to provide an interim release shortly but this will not contain the include and mod files. Here is a sample program that illustrates how it will work in the end.

wahorger · Joined: 13 Oct 2014 Posts: 1255 Location: Morrison, CO, USA

Thanks, Paul. This will be very helpful.

Bill

PaulLaidler · Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 5:13 pm Post subject:

New options [colors] and [icons] have now been added for %ls and %`ls.
[colors] displays coloured boxes to the left of the list using an array of RGB values.
[icons] displays icons to the left of the list. These are automatically constructed from a continuous horizontal strip of 16x16 bitmaps.

The following sample illustrates how it will work...

LitusSaxonicum · Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 6:24 pm Post subject:

Bill,

I'm mightily impressed that you do PDF output, although you can lay out pages with ClearWin+ and then use the WIndows PDF print driver.

Eddie

wahorger · Joined: 13 Oct 2014 Posts: 1255 Location: Morrison, CO, USA

Eddie,

Most of the PDF I do is to create output files of numerical-style reports and graphics data. The resulting PDF's (especially for the graphics data) that my users create are usually 36 inches wide (wide format plotter) and can easily be 1000 inches long. The PDF allows them to print at 300DPI.

PDF's gives me a "surface" that has virtually no limits (the PDF SW interface limits outputs to 22,000 inches in both directions; no one has that much data). It's only that limit because there is a commercial drill hole laser printer that can continuous feed 2000 sheets of 11" long paper.

Because the PDF has actual move/draw style internal data, the resulting file is much, much smaller than one can get if a PDF file is created as an image. This may not be true for all graphics data; it is for my applications.

The PDF report capability allows me to generate a printed report that responds to all the "standard" Fortran carriage control characters, as well as additional features (i.e. placing data at specific page locations given an (x,y) coordinate) at the same time the report is being created.

It has been fun using the PDF library for both text-style reports as well as the graphics routines I built to surround the PDF interface calls. I built an FTN95 compatible driver for the report capability. There are a few features I'd add to FTN95 that would remove the "kludge" interface of supplying file names to user-drivers, but it's a small price to pay.

Bill