Re: Russian on //c: GUI, fonts, how?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Armagon <armagon@my-deja.com> wrote:

> I don't imagine that it is possible to rewrite the images of characters to
> the character buffer so that Cyrillic letters could be displayed on the text
> screen, is it?

No.  The character set comes from a ROM.  You could replace the ROM,
e.g. changing the localised display language on an international IIc
model to be Cyrillic, while leaving US ASCII in the other half of the
ROM.

The available language options for the Apple II have always been very
limited in the number of characters they redefine (about six), losing
uncommon symbols like the curly braces in favour of the most common
letters from the language.

> Which means graphics, right?  Are there any suitable GUIs out there?

There is Publish-It!, which uses IIgs fonts (which are derived from
bitmapped Macintosh fonts).  You could use a bitmapped Cyrillic font
this way.

There was also a word processor written in New Zealannd called
"FullText", which was able to operate in both text and graphics modes,
with its own special font format in graphics mode.  I doubt anyone used
it for Cyrillic.

> How much of a headache would trying to add colour be?

It is impractical to do coloured text on the Apple II hi-res graphics
screen, because the design of the video circuitry uses dot patterns to
encode colour.  In effect, you lose half the horizontal resolution in
order to achieve colour display, so the best you could achieve would be
something in the order of 20 columns of text.

> How about trying to use double hi-res graphics?

This is difficult to implement, but there are libraries which can take
the hard work out of it.  Double hi-res would allow you to implement an
equivalent of 80 column text with graphical characters, as long as you
used a monochrome monitor.

If you want colour, you are no better off than standard hi-res, because
double hi-res uses four bits per pixel to select colours.  Both modes
give you an effective horizontal resolution of 140 colour pixels.

The IIgs is much better off with its super hi-res graphics screen.  It
can display 16 colours per pixel with 320 pixels per line, or 4 colours
per pixel with 640 pixels per line.

> (Is there a version of basic I can legally  download that supports double
> hi-res?)

Applesoft has never supported Double hi-res directly.  Some of the
third-party BASICs (such as ZBasic) might, but I don't know about their
legal status.