[HECnet] Downloadble fonts into an VT220?

[Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-]

Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> writes:

I came across this little gem when perusing VT220 escape code:

"4.4.2 Designating Soft (Down-Line-Loadable) Character Sets

You can define a soft character set (font) that may or may not replace =
one of the existing hard sets (ROM fonts). If you do replace a hard set, =
the replacement occurs for both the 80 and 132-column versions"

Does VMS support this? Or is it up to the terminal emulator?

Of course VMS supports this.   All that is needed is to send a series of 
properly formatted escape sequences to the VT220.

Back in the early 1980s, I used this feature to turn the US Navy's VT220
terminals being used with the DATCP HITS (Digital Automatic Test Program 
Generation Hierarchical Integrated Test Simulator) I was developing into
a data scope.   You used these soft-font in much the same was as the DEC
Line Drawing sets.   You load the terminals GR (Graphic Region) with the
soft-font set with an escape sequence and then, subsequence ASCII codes
will cause the font in the selected graphic region to be displayed.   The
terminology DEC used for the format for depositing these character sets
was SIXELs. 

I'll look around.   Somewhere I have some of thee soft-font files.   There
were a number of them that DEC/DECUS produced such as Cyrillic, Hebrew,
and even an upside-down and backard ASCII set.


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