Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!sco!kurth
From: kurth@sco.COM (Kurt Hutchison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Read Screen Character
Message-ID: <272@scolex>
Date: 16 Jun 88 21:49:20 GMT
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Lines: 36

In article <8806151250.AA29397@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, U211510@HNYKUN11.BITNET (Wil Groenen) writes:
> Dear readers,
> I have a problem which some of you probably have encountered before,
> that is reading a character from screen at current cursor position.
> Somehow I have not been able to find the proper gemdos (?) function
> call for this. Does anyone knows how to handle this, preferably in
> Fortran or Pascal??
> 
>           Wil Groenen

This can't be done easily.  The screen image is stored as graphics data.
No data that describes which character was used to generate the graphics
information is maintained.

Therefore, to find out which character was used, assuming
that you know what resolution you were in and which font table was
used, you could extract the graphics information from the screen
and compare it with every entry in the font table until
you found a match.

It would probably be easier just to save a local image
of the screen as you create it.  It *IS* possible to get the current cursor
location by sending the cursor save string to the roms and then
looking in the documented location for the saved cursor address.

At least that way you don't have to keep track of the cursor position
but you will probablyt have to keep track of the data.

		Good luck,
			- kurt

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kurt Hutchison		The Santa Cruz Operation	Software Engineer
Trumpet player, synth player, pianist, cyclist, philosopher at large
The above opinions (if any) are my own