Displaying Character-Based Text
The routines in the following table ask about screen
attributes that affect text display, prepare the screen for text and send text
to the screen. To print text in specialized fonts, see
Displaying Font-Based Characters and
Using Fonts from the Graphics Library Overview.
In addition to these general text routines, you can
customize the text in your menus with
MODIFYMENUSTRINGQQ
. You can
also customize any other string that QuickWin produces, including status bar
messages, the state message (for example, "Paused" or "Running"), and dialog
box messages, with
SETMESSAGEQQ
. Use of these
customization routines is described in
Customizing QuickWin Applications Overview.
The following routines recognize text-window
boundaries:
Routine
| Description
|
|---|---|
CLEARSCREEN | Clears the screen, viewport, or text window
|
DISPLAYCURSOR | Sets the cursor on or off
|
GETBKCOLOR | Returns the current background color index
|
GETBKCOLORRGB | Returns the current background
Red-Green-Blue color value
|
GETTEXTCOLOR | Returns the current text color index
|
GETTEXTCOLORRGB | Returns the current text Red-Green-Blue
color value
|
GETTEXTPOSITION | Returns the current text-output position
|
GETTEXTWINDOW | Returns the boundaries of the current text
window
|
OUTTEXT | Sends text to the screen at the current
position
|
SCROLLTEXTWINDOW | Scrolls the contents of a text window
|
SETBKCOLOR | Sets the current background color index
|
SETBKCOLORRGB | Sets the current background Red-Green-Blue
color value
|
SETTEXTCOLOR | Sets the current text color to a new color
index
|
SETTEXTCOLORRGB | Sets the current text color to a new
Red-Green-Blue color value
|
SETTEXTPOSITION | Changes the current text position
|
SETTEXTWINDOW | Sets the current text-display window
|
WRAPON | Turns line wrapping on or off
|
These routines do not provide text-formatting
capabilities. If you want to print integer or floating-point values, you must
convert the values into a string (using an internal
WRITE
statement) before
calling these routines. The text routines specify all screen positions in
character-row and column coordinates.
SETTEXTWINDOW
is the text equivalent of the
SETVIEWPORT
graphics routine,
except that it restricts only the display area for text printed with
OUTTEXT
,
PRINT
, and
WRITE
.GETTEXTWINDOW
returns the boundaries of the
current text window set by
SETTEXTWINDOW
.
SCROLLTEXTWINDOW
scrolls the
contents of a text window.OUTTEXT
,
PRINT
, and
WRITE
display text strings
written to the current text window.
The
WRITE
statement sends its
carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) to the screen at the beginning of the
first I/O statement following the
WRITE
statement. This can
cause unpredictable text positioning if you mix the graphics routines
SETTEXTPOSITION
and
OUTTEXT
with the
WRITE
statement. To
minimize this effect, use the backslash ( \ ) or dollar sign ( $ ) format
descriptor (to suppress CR-LF) in the associated
FORMAT
statement.
See more information on routines mentioned here, see
the routine descriptions in the
Language Reference
.