

Additional changes concerning phonetic font management

There are two major changes which have been made to the LinguaFont set
since the documentation was prepared for print. The first concerns the phon-
etic font in Times Roman (proportional) typeface. There are now two fonts on
the fonts disk, one named PH_TMS_1.LPF and another called PH_TMS_2.LPF. The
fonts are quite similar but the second contains symbols in 11 point typeface,
the first being a 12 point font. Both fonts are identical in the ASCII values
assigned to symbols with the screen font named LTXT_CHR.VGA. A word or two of
explanation are required at this point.

It is possible with VGA colour systems to display 512 characters (two full
symbol sets) at any one time. This is due to the fact that with VGA adapters
one can specify an alternate symbol set to be used instead of bright letters
(used for highlighting on the screen). I have made use of this feature to
allow users to load their own second symbol set, in the present case the
phonetic set called LTXT_CHR.VGA. Whether you see these symbols on screen
of course depends on the software you are using. If you have the Lexa software
system at your disposal (available from the Norwegian Computing Centre for the
Humanities as well) then you can avail of a second symbol set by specifying
this in an initialization file. Take a look at the supplied initialization and
ensure that you use version 5.5 of Lexa Text, the text editor supplied with
the Lexa software package, and that the programme can access the utility
LOADSET.EXE.

Users of WordPerfect (5.1) can also avail of the possibility of displaying a
second character set on the computer's screen. The way this works is as 
follows: you start WordPerfect and press Shift-F1 for Setup, then 2,1,3 to
determine the type of display used. Now you choose to display underlined 
characters as they are, i.e. using the supplied underline character set which
is supplied with WordPerfect 5.1. You must now rename the file LTXT_CHR.VGA
VGAUND.FRS so that WordPerfect uses your character set instead of the set
containing underlined characters. You activate underlining, i.e. in this case
your own symbol set, by pressing Shift-F8,2,2 when within WordPerfect.

Included on the fonts disk is a printer driver for WordPerfect which is en-
titled PHONETIC.PRS. If you select this (press Shift-F7 and then 'S' for
Select printer) and choose Times Roman 12 Point as your base font, then any
text which you underline will appear in special characters on screen and on
print, assuming that you load the character files PH_TMS_1.LPF and PH_TMS_2.LPF
into the printer before hand by typing 'load_ph' (without the inverted commas,
of course) when in DOS. The printer driver file contains the correct spacing
definitions for each character of the files PH_TMS_1.LPF and PH_TMS_2.LPF (12
and 11 point character definitions respectively) so that you can achieve
justified text when availing of the special font.

The second major change concerns the editor of characters for laser printers,
LaserEd. When you choose a font for editing now any VGA-based computer will
switch to a 50-line display mode automatically. This has the advantage that
twice as much of each character can be displayed on screen and that the pro-
portions of the font you are processing are more accurately shown. You can
toggle between a 50-line mode and the normal 25-line display by pressing
Ctrl-V. By using Ctrl-F6 you can hide the grid used for character editing
and with Alt-F6 you can toggle between a solid and a shaded block for the
character you are drawing.


Raymond Hickey                                 Essen, November 1993

