Condensed Fixed Font Problem

[Lee Bergeron]

All line printers have a built in "condensed font", usually 17cpi. Using LPRINT
in condensed mode creates a very readable report (not too small). Using XPRINT
however, I need to specilfy a FONT. Using Courier New at 7 Points yields the
necessary 17 cpi but is very hard to read (small characters). Since I need
a Fixed Font I don't have much choice. How would the gurus handle this? This needs to be done using DDOC. I have tried playing with the LOGFONT settings
to no avail. Would like to use a standard windows font instead of a purchaed
one that would need to be loaded on every machine (I'll do it as a last resort).
If I only could get the character height larger without changing anything else,
it would look better.

[Michael Mattias]

dpfont...
dpfontspacing....
....

[Lee Bergeron]

Michael - dpFONT is how I select a FONT. This only allows for POINT Size
input. dpFONTSPACING only allows adding (or removing) space after the
character (not what I want to do since I need Fixed size FONT). What I need
to do is select the FONT (Courier New), select the size (7 POINT) then somehow
alter the height of the characters to make them more readable.

[Michael Mattias]

> select the size (7 POINT) then somehow alter the height of the characters

????

Um, the height IS the point size.....

But bottom line, if you can't create the font you want with dpFont + dpFontSpacing, you can't use it with ddoc P&P. AFAIK there never was a provision to use a font created with CreateFont or CreateFontIndirect. (Well, as a licensed user you have the source code available and you could add support for that yourself. HINT: compiler used was PB/DLL 6.11, so expect a bit of porting work).

You could try other monospaced fonts, but then again there is no guarantee those will be available on the target system and you'd have to supply a redistributable font file with your application. (you would not have to INSTALL it, just have the file available).

[Lee Bergeron]

Michael, as you can see I'm not that Windows Programming savvy. One last
question - to your knowledge is it possible to take Courier New FONT and using
CreateFontIndirect make a Font that will be fixed (10cpi,12cpi,17cpi) and
have characters of a height which is decent to read? If it is, then I can go down that road othwise I won't waist my time trying. Sorry if the technical verbiage isn't 100% accurate - I think you probably can surmise what I need.

[Michael Mattias]

About all you can do is test. Courier New is a TrueType font, so it is 100% scalable.

With ddoc, you can do something like....

  LOCAL szRuler AS ASCIIZ * 192

  FOR I = 1 TO 13 
    szRuler = szRuler & "----+----|"
  NEXT 
 - Initialize doc use inches
 - start page  (I don't think you need to do that on page one)

 szFace      = "Courier New"
 X  =  0.5     ' left margin
 Y  =  1.0     ' top margin
FOR  ptsize = 12 to 6 STEP -0.5    ' 12 or 13 different font sizes
   dpFont   hDoc, %DDOC_FONTNORMAL, ptsize, %NULL (black), szFace
   szText = USING$ ("The Quick Brown Fox was ##.## points taller than the tiny dog", ptsize)
   dpText   X, Y, szRuler, %DDOC_LEFT
   Y        =  Y + 0.25   ' advance one quarter inch down
   dpText   x, y, szText, %DDOC_LEFT
   Y       =  Y + 0.5!    '  advance one-half inch down 
NEXT
 dpEndDoc OPTIONS

... and see what you can read.

You can modify the test loop to include the dpFontSpacing if you want.

(Yes, you CAN use non-integral point sizes).

MCM

[Michael Mattias]

FWIW... your tax dollars at work... four hundred thousand million of them each year to be exact....

Medicare specifications call for the use of seven (7) point Courier New on the Medicare Part B/DME remittance advice report.

No, I can't read it. But I created it that way anyway (using ddoc).

See: The Provider Payment Partner(tm) System for more ddoc-created report samples in the product .

At least I got to deduct the cost of the magnifying glass as a business item.

MCM

[Paul Purvis]

Lee,
i hope this does not sound too silly, but have you tried the bold face.
paul