D]3 P]P1club P]P2diamond P]P3heart P]P4spade ]]61FANTASY CHARACTERS: ONE USE FOR LIREPIC STRAIGHT FROM THE ]PP3 00 ]]61By Les Johnson ]]71 (JUMPDISK NOTE: If you are reading this from the Article Menu, ]]71it's suggested you instead read it by double-clicking the FANTACHAR.DOC icon ]]71in the FANTACHAR drawer. This second method reveals the graphic characters ]]71that are meant to be seen within the text. To see the file as it was ]]71written, with special character coding evident, use a COPY of JUMPDISK, get ]]71an INFO screen for the FANTACHAR.DOC icon, and change the default tool from: :util/lirepic to :util/ppmore ]]71. . . and save it, then double-click the icon to see the new version.) The amazing and apparently inexhaustible Charles Vassallo struck again in the April 1990 issue with LIREPIC, a utility that allows combining text and images in a scrolling screen reader. It's one of those applications that lets even non-programmers like me come up with allegedly creative applications. It occurred to me I could make special characters as DeluxePaint brushes and incorporate them into text with LIREPIC. So can you, if you have a paint program like DP. A truth-in-advertising caveat: You can't send these files to a printer unless you have a graphics printer, and even then not without using a screen grabber. So this tutorial restricts itself to screen displays only of fantasy characters integrated with text. At the high end, you could make characters germane to the sciences -- math, physics and the like. In the middle, you could construct rebuses -- those puzzles that combine words pictures to form the answer. I will content myself with a fairly low-end example and tell you how I did it: Surely, you've glanced at a bridge column in the daily newspaper: ] Miss South bids 7 ]PP4 00 and winks at her partner, Mister North. ] Mr. West loosens his tie and bids 6 ]PP3 00. ] Mr. North, misunderstanding Miss South's wink, bids 14 ]PP3 00 as a sign he's romantically interested. In disgust, Miss South throws down her cards and goes home. There are ]]PP1 00s, ]PP2 00s, ]PP3 00s and ]PP4 00s everywhere. Well, that could get boring. How about: ]I ]PP3 00 New York. ]]PP2 00 ]PP2 00 are a girl's best friends. ]I had my dog ]PP4 00. ]I ]PP1 00 baby seals. (Just kidding! I ]PP3 00 all sorts of animals!) So enough fun. Now we have to get down to how it's done, so you can make yourself a batch of peculiar characters germane to your own situation. If you have the April 1990 issue, go back and read Vassallo's own documentation. If not, I'll tell you enough to limp through. ]]31YOU DO HAVE DELUXEPAINT, DON'T YOU? I must presume you have a paint program. I use DeluxePaint, so I must tell how I created these characters using DP. 1. Start DP and choose 640-by-200 medium resolution with eight colors. You could use 16, but save those for more involved brushes you might make after you get the fundamentals. 2. The LIREPIC program uses the default Topaz font. In practicality, it allows for 7-by-7-pixel characters. I found that restrictive, so I decided to make my brushes double-wide, 15-by-7 pixels. I was careful not to go deeper than 7 pixels, because I wanted my symbols to stay vertically comfortable within a line. But don't lose sight of the fact that with LIREPIC you can create quite large illustrations and format text around them. 3. To ease creation of the symbols, I opened a magnify window and created a work space exactly 15 pixels wide and 7 deep. I did two things to help with this detailed work. I turned on the COORDINATES feature available from a pulldown menu, and I magnified the work area even more by clicking the right mouse on the option box to the left of the magnify box. 4. After the taxing work of creating each symbol, I isolated each as a brush the same size as the character, 15 by 7, and saved them in turn to the FANTACHAR drawer by obvious names: club, diamond, heart and spade. That concluded the DeluxePaint work. Then I wrote and formatted this article to make the brushes appear where I wamnted them within the text. Because the brushes are no deeper than the Topaz font, there was no need for monkeying around with the text. ]]31THE FORMATTING In the examples that fall ahead, disregard the numbers and spaces to the left of the example formatting. I did it this way so LIREPIC would ignore the formatting and you could see it. The numbers refer to notes below the samples. You might print this article to see the formatting. It starts with these lines: 1. D]3 2. P]P1club 3. P]P2diamond 4. P]P3heart 5. P]P4spade 1. This is the plane depth. It could be D]1 for 2 colors, D]2 for 4 colors, the D]3 it is for eight colors, or D]4 for 16 colors. How do you know which a brush is? Before saving it, check the palette and see how many colors are in it. 2. This defines an image that will be loaded and displayed within the text. Items 2 through 5 are essentially the same. Here's the breakdown: It's an picture file: P Code name of image: ]P1 The brush's name: club Just remember it has no spaces: P]P1club That's simple, isn't it? ]]31THE LAST THINGS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW TO DO THIS. When you want to put one of the symbols in the text, start the line with a LEFT BRACKET: ] Then, at the place where you want, let's say, the club symbol to appear, put in this code: ]PP1 00 The ]PP1 indicates you want picture 1, already defined as the club, and the 00 indicates you want the top eight-pixel (or less) slice of the image. Since these images are only 7 pixels deep, you need not worry about how to put in more slices. A little warning: You can't give a good display on the same screen to brushes made with different palette values. I avoided problems by using the same palette colors for all four brushes. In this issue of JUMPDISK, LIREPIC is in a UTIL drawer. When you write your LIREPIC application, attach a PROJECT icon to it (the one used for this article will do), but change the default of the icon. How? Choose INFO from the pulldown menu at top left of the Workbench screen. The default will say: :util/lirepic Change it to read :drawername/lirepic ]. . . where ]71 drawername ]21 means the name of the drawer in which all the material is located (like FANTACHAR. Then copy LIREPIC into that drawer. A CLI or shell command will do it: copy j:util/lirepic to mydisk:mydrawer/lirepic ]]31SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT WANT TO KNOW I'll tell you more than you need to know, with the hope it will whet your interest enough to read Vassallo's docs. You display multi-slice pictures by well-placed subsequent format codes for a picture, as in: (text could go to the ]PP1 00 left of the image. I ]PP1 01 offer this as example.) ]PP1 02 The text can also be given different colors numbered 1 to N, where N is the 7 in a three-plane image, 15 in a four-plane image. This parts gets beyond the scope of what I set out to do (as writers say when they begin to realize they have struck a vein of ignorance in themselves). You might understand it better by experimenting on a copy of JUMPDISK with the text coding I've used. My job is complete. ] Study hard. You'll be a member of the LIREPIC ]PP1 00 in no time.