FONT=<facename> {,<symbol set>}

Examples:  FONT=MIAME Terminal   (default)

           FONT=Courier New

           FONT=Lucida Console,ANSI

 

Under A-Shell/Windows, FONT may be use to specify two aspects of the font: the face name and the symbol set. The face is the name that appears in standard font selection dialog boxes (including the one on A-Shell's Edit menu), such as Andale Mono or Lucida Console. It is case sensitive. If not specified, the default font will be MIAME Terminal.

The symbol set may optionally be specified as OEM, ANSI, or DEFAULT. If not specified, OEM is used.

The face name will be overridden by a font specified in the default.ash or other settings file. (See the –Settings File switch and the Font topic for more details.) However, the symbol set will affect all subsequent font selections, even overriding a previously saved font in the settings file.

The only fonts suitable for A-Shell are those that offer a fixed pitch, so that typically limits you to Courier New, Lucida Console, Andale Mono, and MIAME Terminal. The first two of these are pre-installed with most copies of Windows, and the latter is pre-installed with A-Shell. Andale Mono was developed by Microsoft and its install program is included with A-Shell and ZTERM. (For some obscure reason, Microsoft doesn't want to bundle it with Windows.)

MIAME Terminal is a raster font and comes in a finite range of sizes. (Actually there are no less than 83 MIAME font sizes, ranging from a character cell size of 1 x 1 to 12 x 20 pixels.) But that imposes a maximum practical window size of 960 x 480. After that, you just get larger borders and more space. The others are TrueType fonts, which are scaled dynamically and thus provide for a much better range of window sizes.

The symbol set determines which characters are available and how they are numbered. The MIAME Terminal font supports only the OEM set, but most others support both OEM and ANSI. Fortunately, both character sets use the same values for the ASCII printable characters 32-127, so it probably makes little difference in most applications which one you use. Furthermore, both character sets include the Latin1 characters in the range 128-255, and although they are mapped differently, if you specify OPTIONS=LATIN1 A-Shell will convert both mappings to match the Latin1 mapping used under AMOS (such as with the AM65A terminal).

Historically, the main problem with the ANSI character set in A-Shell was that it didn't include the line drawing characters, but this is no longer an issue since A-Shell renders them graphically. The only remaining shortcoming is its lack of a few special characters available in the alternate character set via TAB(-1,65) thru TAB(-1,77) commands (raised dot, end of line, horizontal tab, paragraph, dagger, section, cent, quarter, half, trademark, copyright, register mark). On the other hand, the OEM character sets (except for the MIAME Terminal version) do not include a Euro symbol. With ANSI , you can display a Euro symbol via TAB(-1,253) or chr(128).

Note that Windows applications such as A-Shell can only make “requests” for a particular font. The system then provides a font that is the best match for the requirements given. Thus, you can easily end up with an unexpected font if your system does not have the requested font installed. For example, if you ask for Andale Mono but it isn't installed, it should try to select something with similar capabilities, hopefully (but not necessarily) ending up with a font reasonably like Courier New.

The actual font and symbol set in use is identified on the A-Shell/Windows Help...About box.

 

In order to use a national replacement character set, you must specify the OEM symbol set. See the CONSOLE and CHARSET parameters.