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THE SCREEN DUMP program, published in the December issue of Sinclair User, gained such a good response from GL users that Eigen, the producer of the program, has decided to continue its QL range. Windows, Icons and Fonts is the result.
The program contains an upgraded version of the dump routine but its main task is to enable the creation of icons and user defined character sets.
When booted, WIF provides a menu of six options, the selection of which depends upon what you want to produce. To make life easy a window driver can be installed which adds some commands to SuperBasic. They include the usual open and close commands with the addition of right, left, up, down and swap. The latter four commands shift windows around the screen and swap or transpose one window with another.
To create a set of icons you must select the Icon Editor. That holds a file of 32 icons in memory and you can change the picture contents by selecting any one of them using a key number from one to 32.
Each icon comprises 22 squares in width and length, each of which can be inked or left blank to create an image. When you're happy with that icon you can either create another or save the block of 32 images to microdrive or disc.
The icons you have created can be used in your SuperBasic programs by loading in the icon driver. That activates a SuperBasic extension which has the format:
ICON index, x,y,paper,border
Index is the number of the icon in the file, X and Y mark the spot on the screen where you want it to appear, and paper and border invoke the colours in which you want to show it. The extension can, of course, be used with a channel specification.
You can also create fonts - character sets - using WIF. The Font Editor works in a similar way to the Icon Editor. There are 128 character blocks within each font file, those are accessible using a key number from zero to 127. Each character is four square components across and eight down. Characters are created using the same technique as that used with the creation of icons.
To use your fonts in SuperBasic programs you must invoke the Font Driver contained on the WIF cartridge. Once run it will provide three SuperBasic extensions. The QL has two character sets in ROM, one which is in operation at all times, and the other which can be switched in using a QDOS command. Using the SuperBasic extensions you can replace those two character sets or create a third.
The package includes two examples, one shows off the windowing capabilities of WIF and the other the icons. It is documented with an easy to understand manual and you will find that creating icon menus to represent tasks such as loading programs, or getting directories from microdrive will save time and make QL operation easier.
WIF is the best icon and character generation package I have seen for the QL and can be obtained through mail order for a very competitive price. Anyone who's fascinated with icons will be bowled over by WIF.
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