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.

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.

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.

Warning: 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.

For more information: