AMCAF provides you with powerful instructions for font managing.
For example the Change Font command allows you to set a font without having to
get the full font list using Get Disk Fonts etc. and therefore reduces the
time to access disk considerably.
Hard disk drive users have the unbelievable opportunity to store any disk font in an AMOS memory bank and so are
totally independent of the fonts directory and the diskfont.library.
CHANGE FONT
instruction: load a font from disk
Change Font "fontname.font"
Change Font "fontname.font",height
Change Font "fontname.font",height,style
Opens a font directly from disk. This font will be taken for future text print outs. 'height' represents the vertical size of the font, a default height of 8 will be filled in if this parameter is omitted. The 'style' parameter is only required in special cases and sets the type of the requested charset (see Set Text).
Since Amiga OS 2.0 it's even possible to load multicoloured fonts. The poor
guys on Kickstart 1.3 can use the program ColorText (which e.g is included
on the DPaint disk) to patch the graphics.library to handle these fonts as
well.
The diskfont.library (length=51200 bytes) found on the Fonts disk can scale your font to your desired size.
If you open many fonts, you should call the command Flush Libs from time to time to remove unused fonts from memory.
With the Make Bank Font command you can convert this font into a memory
bank, so you don't require the diskfont.library and the font file anymore.
Additionally, you can change the font which is used for the Print
instruction using Change Print Font.
MAKE BANK FONT
instruction: create a font bank
Make Bank Font bank number
Using this powerful command you can store any Amiga font in a memory bank. The current font on the current screen will be taken to create the font bank numbered. To change the current text font simply use the Change Font instruction.
These banks don't require the 'diskfont.library' or other disk access any more, once they have been created. To load a font from a bank use the Change Bank Font command.
CHANGE BANK FONT
instruction: set the screen font from a bank font
Change Bank Font bank number
This command sets the text font on the current screen to the one saved in the memory bank numbered.
If you change the font using this command, no diskfont.library is required any more.
This command is also quite important if you write your programs to be installed on hard disk that use your own fonts.
Bank Fonts can be created easily with the Make Bank Font command.
CHANGE PRINT FONT
instruction: change the font that is used by print
Change Print Font bank
Change Print Font changes the charset which is used for the Print command.
This font always 8x8 pixels big and contains 256 characters, which is
stored in a memory bank of exactly 2 KB (=2048 bytes).
Therefore the 'bank' parameter has to point exactly to such a bank.
These Print-Font banks can be created by hand (reserve the bank, write 8 bytes per chars) or with the help of the Font-Editor supplied on the Accessories disk (AMOSPro_Accessories:Font8x8_Editor.AMOS) and then can be loaded using Dload.
FONT STYLE
function: return the current text styles
style=Font Style
This functions replaces the AMOS function Text Styles, because this one
does not return the multicoloured font bit (Bit 6).
Apart from this, Font Style is totally identical with the AMOS function.