rpVTcustom

rpVT Customization

Customizing Fonts, Colors, Sort Tables and others

1) What happens if I remove the 'zt' characters from the first line in 'rpVT.clr'?

rpVT has four internal color schemes. The first one is called the default and cannot have its colors individually specified. You can either use the rpVT default, which is yellow over black, or copy the basic colors from ZTree if you add those 'zt' characters.

So, colors 2, 3 & 4 can be edited in full by yourself but color 1 will be either yellow on black or a reasonable replica of ZTree colors. We say 'reasonable' in here because ZTree can have more than one color specified for the letters and background, depending on the functions being executed and rpVT does not need that feature and uses only the colors chosen by ZTree for the main file display.

2) How do I customize a color scheme?

The rpVT.clr file has some information about it and also the general tutorial text. The subject is not a very easy one. As usual in rpVT, flexible but complex is the standard.

In general you should know about RGB colors and read the explanation about alpha values. The editing of the colors is a task for a simple text editor.

3) Why should I change the appearance of the fonts?

Maybe you didn't like the way some character was originally designed and decided to change that so you don't get distracted all the time. Maybe (like us) you don't like the fact that the zero and uppercase O are almost identical on some fonts and creates confusion many times.

Maybe you are using rpVT to drive a display with big letters and need a special character for special occasions like a different cross or an OEM/ANSI non-existent foreign character.

4) In case I need, how can I change the appearance of a character?

Well, although you cannot change the width and height of the characters, because rpVT executable expects them to be of a specific size, you can fully change the pixels on/off state within the fonts file and change the characters drawing to anything you want.

Each character is defined by a group of words that represents the horizontal rows of bits of a character rectangle. If the height of a font is 12 (like the 8x12), there will be 12 words describing the on/off pixels for each character. The sequence of rows is from bottom to top and the least significant bit carries the value of the left most pixel.

All fonts are put in sequential order without any separator between them and you need to calculate the size of all preceding fonts to find the beginning of each one. Here is a list of font names and the corresponding address (in bytes, not words) inside the file. Remember that each font has 2 sets of characters OEM & ANSI, in this order:

4x6 0 5x12 6144 6x9 18432 7x11 27648
8x8 38912 8x12 47104 10x18 59392 12x20 77824

5) I read all information available about the sort tables and I am trying to build one to be put in position # 7, for OEM with case sensitivity. I tried it several times, made a big mess and could not get it to work properly. Would you guys write me such a table?

We would love to do that but, considering the size of our 'to-do' file, we have to decline the request, at least by now. We can, however, teach you some tricks you can use, to do it by yourself:

Use your text editor and copy the current OEM table to a working file. If you are creating a brand new table, copy one of the empty ones. Do not include comment lines in this copy.

Lets assume now that you called this file 'new.txt'. Highlight the file and use the command Y Rsort,alpha,a8,1,3. Delete new.txt and rename new.txt.srt to new.txt. You now have a file with the original order intended by who built this table.

Now use the Cut & Paste functions on the complete lines changing their order until you have the characters in your new desired order.

Now edit the 3 digit numbers from the first column until they show a definitely ascending order. Note that the numbers don't have to be continuous (i.e. next = previous+1) but, definitely, have to be in ascending order (next = previous or previous+something). Repetition of a number is allowed on the first column. Be careful to edit only the first 3 digits and no others. Also note that the lines that contain the values 00h and FFh, on the second column, should not be edited.

Highlight the edited file and this time use the command Y Rsort,alpha,a8,10,3. The sorted file is your final table and can be pasted into 'rpVT.stb'.

6) I found information about the format translation tables in the tables file itself. It is also quite self explanatory but I still have a point not completely understood: Why some tables of the type $xxx/xxx,s,b do not have necessarily 256 entries?

When the table is of the 'f' type it means it is a direct translation of position in the table for the corresponding value in the table and 256, and only 256, entries are used in a table. The tables of the type 's', like the one you mentioned, translates words into bytes and it is not practical to have tables with 65536 entries. For this reason, those tables work based on a search principle. The table is searched until a match is found or the end of table (NF, xx) is reached. This allow us to build a table with entries varying from 2 to any number, translating to byte values (or word values if they are 's,w'). That is the case if we decide to translate an Unicode page to another Unicode page or to ANSI or OEM.

An OEM/Unicode table will be of type 'f' and will have 256 entries. A Unicode/OEM will be of type 's' and can have variable number of entries, depending on how comprehensively you want to treat the translation.

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