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From: eli@smectos.gang.umass.edu (Eli Brandt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: It would be convenient to have a TP UNDERLINE string function
Message-ID: <19620@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 90 18:56:33 GMT
References: <24397@adm.BRL.MIL> <5727@vice.ICO.TEK.COM> <6512@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM>
Sender: news@dime.cs.umass.edu
Reply-To: eli@smectos.CS.UMASS.EDU (Eli Brandt)
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Lines: 27

In article <6512@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM> decomyn@penguin.uss.tek.com (Vergil William de Comyn) writes:
>In article <5727@vice.ICO.TEK.COM> bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine) writes:
>> Unless you're going to use EGA or VGA and create your own internal 
>> font, you've got an impossible task.  The standard IBM character set
>> is the default for all text modes, and doesn't allow for underlined
>> characters. 
>
>Ah, I see you haven't worked in monochrome recently.  Setting the background/
>foreground attributes correctly will result in underlined text on a monochrome
>card / display.  
>
>True, the color cards will not do this.  Personally, I think it is a flaw in
>the color cards.
>
>Brendt Hess

As the original poster alluded to, it's possible to set up an underlined font
as your alternate font and then tell the video card that you want to treat the
intensity bit as the font-select bit.  Of course, you lose 8 of your 16 colors.
This is obviously only possible on EGA+ video.  To create your underlined font,
you could simply pull the current font from the A000 block (unprotecting it 
first), logical-OR everything with 64 (I *think* that's on the bottom), and
load it as the alternate font.  See a BIOS reference for help.


Disclaimer: hell, I'm not even a student at UMASS, much less a USENET liason
            or something.