Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sco!bobs
From: bobs (Bob Stayton, Yoyodoc)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Reverse video font?
Message-ID: <1522@scorn.sco.COM>
Date: 18 Jan 90 19:48:42 GMT
References: <37700001@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@sco.COM
Reply-To: bobs@sco.COM (Bob Stayton)
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Lines: 32


In article <37700001@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu> hougland@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>I am interested in printing characters in a 'reverse video' format, that
>is white characters on a dark background.  I am afraid I may have to 
>create my own font to do this, but can find no other way so far.  Any
>suggestions would be welcome.
>
>hougland
> 
I had the same problem awhile back and did exactly that:
create a reverse video font.  I learned a lot about
about coding fonts in the process |).

I started with Courier, and then switched to Courier-Bold
when I realized that the thin white lines of Courier
didn't print well.  My routines read the character width
of Courier-Bold, drew a box, filled it with black,
turned on white, and printed a Courier-Bold character in the
box.

It worked fine except for one problem: my software
(troff) refused to output a "space" character in Postscript, it just
repositioned for the next word.  This meant I got reverse
type with white spaces between the words.  Ugly.  So I had
to kludge a filter to convert the spaces in that font to another
character that printed as a black box.  Not elegant, but it
has worked well for two years now.

I will clean up the code and post it shortly.

bobs