This is a short explanation of COLOR CYCLING FONTS; what they are; how
    to use them; and, how to design them. First some definitions.

    COLOR REGISTERS: Registers are places to store data for temporary use.
    Color registers on the Amiga are 32 special memory locations found on
    one of the custom chips. These special memory locations hold the
    temporary information about what colors you are using on each screen.

    COLOR CYCLING: This is the process of using program options to play
    "musical chairs" with the colors of one particular screen.

    BIT PLANES: This is how RAM memory contents of binary numbers of zeros
    and ones turns into stunning graphic displays on the monitor. Fewer bit
    planes conserve memory usage, but sacrifice quantity of colors available
    to use for the screen display. More bit planes add colors while
    increasing RAM storage needs. Each bit plane added doubles the number of
    colors available.

    COLOR CYCLING FONTS: While any set of colors used may be set to color
    cycling, only those fonts particularly designed to be color cycling
    fonts are guaranteed to produce the effects you desire.

    The purpose of color cycling is to produce an inexpensive form of
    animation or grab attention and focus it at the intended point for some
    flashy effect.

    Color cycling fonts are limited in what you can attempt to do by several
    factors. First, color fonts are limited to 16 colors maximum, so that
    restricts you some, and secondly, fonts are designed to place letters of
    the alphabet side-by-side in unpredictable ways. The second limit means
    that effects which look good when spelling one word or sentence might
    look terrible when some other word or sentence is spelled out.

    In some cases, coloring Black-&-White words in Deluxe Paint is more
    efficient and interesting than creating a special font which is colored.
    To make each succeeding letter of a sentence a sequential color means
    that when color cycled it will appear as the colors are smoothly flowing
    from letter to letter. This would not be possible to plan as a special
    color-cycling font.

    In Deluxe Paint, in the Palette window, there are four possible "Color
    Ranges", also called "C-ranges", "CRNG", or as they are in that window:
    C1, C2, C3, C4. These are found just below the color squares showing
    what colors are currently available. Below that is the "speed" bar, to
    preview and set the speed of the color cycling. To the right of the
    speed bar is an arrow to set the direction of cycling. You start with
    default ranges and change them using the RANGE button.

    To set a range click on one of the four color range buttons, click on
    the start color, click on the range button, and click on the end color.
    If you did it right you will see a narrow bar along the left side of the
    color range of color squares from the start color to the end color. To
    test the range, click on the speed bar and move it slightly -- the
    colors will begin to move, speeding us as you move right, and slowing
    down as you move left. Toggle the direction arrow by clicking on it, and
    check out the differences again with the speed control.

    OK, by now you know practically everthing the experts know about color
    cycling. Just a couple little points before we leave the subject of the
    Deluxe Paint palette window. If you want the color changes to abruptly
    pop in and out use high contrast colors in your range. If you would
    prefer a color effect to smoothly increase and diminish from one color
    extreme to another, use the "SPREAD" control.

    Spreading colors means clicking on a start color, clicking on spread,
    and then clicking on an end color. The computer will calculate all the
    intermediate shades in between and change all the intermediate color
    registers to a best approximation of smooth transition of shades. To use
    this without any abrupt changes pick your start of range, set the color
    you desire, copy this color to the end of range. Now pick your other
    extreme color for your spread and set this to the center of the range.
    Spread from the center to the start, and spread from the center to the
    end. When the end color shifts over to the start color register it will
    be the same and no abrupt change will be noticed by the observer.

    Deluxe Paint records the palette selection, including the CRNG settings
    in a custom brush file. You can preserve the color cycling information
    of any painting by clipping a small area to save as a brush. This is not
    automatically restored when you load the brush back in however, and you
    need to select "Use Brush Palette" from the "Color Control" choice of
    the leftmost pull-down menu.

    This is IMPORTANT! Because unless someone records the color ranges and
    speed settings of COLOR CYCLE FONTS and saves them as a brush, you will
    end up with whatever color ranges and color palettes happen to be on the
    screen when you load the font. DPaint does not read the font to find out
    which palette the font was created in, even though Calligrapher records
    that information in there. The user also has to know that they have to
    load that brush and select "Use Brush Palette". Without these two
    things, your carefully planned color cycling font may end up looking a
    mess, with the wrong colors in the font in the first place, and the
    wrong ranges cycling in the second place. The burden is on the creator
    of color cycling fonts to provide clear instructions, and provide a
    background picture or brush with the color palette and crng info.

    Now that we agree on all the ground rules about color cycling fonts,
    there is only one thing left to do: design one. An example of how a
    color cycling font came into existance is the "Shaded" color font
    provided on the Calligrapher release disk, and also available in 8 sizes
    from the author's COLOR FONTS collection #3 disk. I was watching a
    documentary program on TV with a foreign language being translated to
    english subtitles. The titles were genlocked to the scenes and were in
    plain white letters. The action was outdoors, in winter, in (guess what)
    snow, so of course I could not read lots of lines of white type on white
    background. I designed the Shaded font to use 15 of 16 available
    registers. I left register "0" free to be used for genlock, and register
    "1" was a one pixel wide outline in white to provide contrast if
    genlocked over a dark background. registers 2 thru 15 are the default
    rainbow shades of Deluxe Paint, so no brush need be saved or loaded to
    see the font in the same shades as it was created.

    I also created about 20 palette brushes with different spreads to make
    changing the color palette easy. Now just by loading a brush the font
    can be changed from rainbow to shades of Browns, Pinks, Golds, Greys,
    Reds, Blues, Greens, and so on. While color cycling can be an attraction
    it can also be a DISTRACTION. This font looks good not cycled for those
    times it must be low profile, taking second place to the video action
    behind it. However, when Flash is called for, just pressing TAB key will
    get this font moving.