Choosing REBOL View display font and size

[VillageIdiot]

Hello to all and thanks in advance for your help.  I am having trouble with choosing the REBOL View desktop display font.  What I'm getting is the largest, most blocky font my system will display.  It works but it sure is ugly!

Is there some way to force the desktop (and everything on it) to adopt the system default font?  I've searched this forum globally and the documentation for View.  Having found no specifics (which doesn't mean they aren't there, of course), I'm posting this message.  BTW, I'm using REBOL View 1.2.1.1.1 since my platform is not yet supported by View 1.3.x. 

My user name says it all.  Thanks for helping. 

[Gabriele]

I wonder if anyone has ever tried the Viewtop on the Amiga.

There's no simple way to change the font for the Viewtop, but you can of course use any font in your View scripts. I'd guess the Viewtop is using "Helvetica" on the Amiga. It would be possible to hack it to use some other font, I think someone did this in the past. (Using STYLIZE/MASTER and changing FONT-SERIF and FONT-SANS-SERIF should be a good starting point, as long as you do it before the desktop is run - probably inside user.r will work.)

What does the following produce on your system?

Code:

view layout [
    Text "Helvetica 10" font [name: "Helvetica" size: 10]
    Text "Helvetica 12" font [name: "Helvetica" size: 12]
    Text "Helvetica 14" font [name: "Helvetica" size: 14]
    Text "Helvetica 18" font [name: "Helvetica" size: 18]
]

[VillageIdiot]

Hi Gabriele,

Thanks for the reply.  The code you included produces helvetica text in the sizes indicated.  Even the top (system) title bar in REBOL View appears in the system default font.  And the console font is the default font.  It's just the viewtop and script displays (for those that use a GUI) that are in that awful blocky thing (which I think is a version of the old Amiga topaz font).

I'll try the fix you suggested and see what happens.  There's got to be a way to "throw the switch," so to speak, and get the display to some sort of reasonable function.  I'll post again when that experiment is complete.

BTW, Bo Lochansky (I think that's his name) had the Viewtop running quite nicely at REBOL HQ in Ukiah when I visited there several years ago.  He was using an Amiga 3000 with 32 MB of memory and a 68060 accelerator.  It ran as well or better than my older Windows PC (1.7 GHz Pentium 4).  Right now, I'm using the Viewtop on my Amiga One, G3 PPC@600MHz with 512 MB RAM and 40 GB hard drive.  It's running fine under "classic" mode which is totally transparent to the user and has produced no errors except the one under discussion.

Thanks for the help.  I'll get there yet.

VillageIdiot

[Gabriele]

I don't know if the "classic" mode can create any problems; it shouldn't, but it's a factor to keep in consideration.

I used View on the Amiga fine, too, but it was a lot of time ago, and I'm not sure 1.2 was out yet. It's possible that the Viewtop is using a font name of "Arial" or something like that directly, and that gets mapped to topaz. Anyway if the example above works fine then we can rule out a View bug, and the culprit has to be the Viewtop code. BTW, you could try to change  the font name and size in that example to see if you can display correctly all fonts on your system and so on; maybe certain fonts work and others don't, or there's a specific size that creates problems.

[VillageIdiot]

Hi Gabriele,

Changing the font names did work.  Just for grins, I tried "Arial" in size: 16 and got EXACTLY what the viewtop is currently using!  So your insight was correct - it appears that the Viewtop is using "Arial", at least on my system.

So I'm going to try to re-map Arial to my system default (which is Bitstream Vera San Oblique) in the master style sheet and see what kind of havoc results.  Thanks for helping me think about this. 

Also, if you or anyone else has the Amiga 68000 (not 68020) version of View (I think it's 1.2.0.1.1) somewhere in your archive, could you please send it to me?  I have some older (about 20 years old) Amigas and I would like to try it out on them.

VillageIdiot

[VillageIdiot]

I am pursuing another tactic here which may work better.  Again, I don't know how to do it and can't find any documentation on it.  The user.r file contains this line:

system/view/screen-face/options: none

I'm thinking that the screen-face is what needs modified.  How are the options expressed and what can I do to specify the system default font in this way?  If I'm thinking clearly, this could change everything back to "normal". 

[i][/i]

[Gabriele]

Options for the screen face allow for things like controlling the screen where to open View windows (IIRC, it's been too long), but nothing about fonts. You probably have to check the viewtop sources and see if the font is hardcoded there, otherwise you can probably use STILIZE/MASTER.

[VillageIdiot]

Thanks for the continuing help.  Please point me in the direction of the documentation for the sytle sheets, particularly the master style sheet.  I remember seeing something about this but, being unconcerned at the time, didn't catalog it in my personal REB book.

And just so I'll know how to do it, where can I read documentation on the screen face options?  Haven't ever seen that one. 

Thanks for the help.  I'm sure I'll get it fixed soon.

Village Idiot

[Philippe]

Hello,

Some links :
http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-system.html

http://www.rebol.com/docs.html  (see section "For Graphical Programming")


===Philippe