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From: schaefer@ogcvax.UUCP (Barton E. Schaefer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Kermit 2.0
Message-ID: <1397@ogcvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 29-Aug-87 23:48:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: ogcvax.1397
Posted: Sat Aug 29 23:48:16 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 00:37:14 EDT
Reply-To: schaefer@ogcvax.UUCP (Barton E. Schaefer)
Organization: Oregon Graduate Center, Beaverton, OR
Lines: 37

First of all, thanks to those who gave suggestions on how to load KERMIT from
a BASIC program.  As it turns out,
	LOAD "KERMIT",8,1
does indeed work.  I looked back at my program, and discovered that I was doing
	KT=1:LOAD "KERMIT.BOOT",8,1
Line 10 (first in the program) has to look like
	IF KT=1 THEN END
in order for this to work -- the END causes KERMIT.BOOT to run when the BASIC
program exits.  I would still like to know why this is only partly reliable,
but since directly loading KERMIT works, I'll do that.

Now on to another question.  Has anybody out there doctored KERMI 2.0 to use a
different character set?  I find it very difficult to distinguish some
characters in the set used.  I have worked out the pixel patterns for a more
legible 80-column set used by the program that came with my modem, and I wonder
how difficult it would be to to substitute this set into KERMIT.

Of course, any 80-column set on the C64 screen has its drawbacks; the authors
of KERMIT seem to have decided to maximize spacing BETWEEN letters, while the
set I prefer maximizes spacing WITHIN letters (allowing wide letters like W to
touch adjacent letters).  As an example, the KERMIT character set leaves a
detectable space between a pair of hyphens, i.e. "--", while the set I prefer
runs them together into a single long line.  The effects of all this are that
certain letter combinations are less legible in my preferred set, but
"solitary" letters (surrounded by whitespace or by narrow letters) are always
easily distinguished, which is not true in KERMIT (at least to my eyes on my
screen).

Can anyone help me with this?  And if the authors of KERMIT are watching, are
you interested in a possible alternate character set?  How about two sets,
"wide" and "narrow" for the next version, where "narrow" is the current set,
and let the user choose his preferred configuration?
-- 
Bart Schaefer			CSNET:	schaefer@Oregon-Grad
				UUCP:	...{tektronix,verdix}!ogcvax!schaefer
"Face it ... computers have revolutionized the workplace."
"Right.  The Ayatollah did the same thing to Iran."		-- J. MacNelly