Intuition Text

Creating Text

The IntuiText structure provides a simple way of writing text strings within an Intuition display element. These strings may be used in windows, screens, menus, gadgets and requesters. To set up an IntuiText, you specify the following:

• Pen colors for the text.
• A draw mode.
• The starting offset for the text.
• The font used to render the text.
• The text string to output.

IntuiText Structure

To render text using Intuition, the application must create one or more instances of the IntuiText structure:

struct IntuiText
    {
    UBYTE FrontPen, BackPen;
    UBYTE DrawMode;
    WORD LeftEdge;
    WORD TopEdge;
    struct TextAttr *ITextFont;
    UBYTE *IText;
    struct IntuiText *NextText;
    };

Here is a brief description of each member of the IntuiText structure:

FrontPen

The pen number specifying the color used to draw the text.

BackPen

The pen number specifying the color used to draw the background for the text, if JAM2 drawing mode is specified.

DrawMode

This field specifies one of four drawing modes:

JAM1	FrontPen is used to draw the text; background color is unchanged.
JAM2	FrontPen is used to draw the text; background color is changed to the color in BackPen.
COMPLEMENT	The characters are drawn in the complement of the colors that were in the background.
INVERSID	Inverses the draw modes describe above. For instance INVERVID used with JAM1 means the character is untouched while the background is filled with the color of the FrontPen.

LeftEdge, TopEdge

The location of the text relative to its base position when it is drawn. These offsets are added to the base position to determine the final location of the text data.

The base position for text rendered with PrintIText() is taken from arguments passed in the function call. For gadgets and menus, the base position is always the upper, left corner of the select box. For requesters the base position is always the upper, left corner of the requester.

LeftEdge gives the offset of the left edge of the character cell and TopEdge gives the offset of the top edge of the character cell for the first character in the text string. Negative values of LeftEdge and TopEdge move the position up and to the left of the base position. Positive values move down and to the right.

ITextFont

A pointer to a TextAttr structure defining the font to be used. Set this to NULL to use the default font.

IText

A pointer to the NULL terminated text string to be displayed.

NextText

A pointer to another instance of IntuiText. Set this field to NULL for the last IntuiText in a list.

Directly Drawing the IntuiText

Use the PrintIText() call to directly draw the text into the target RastPort of a window or screen.

VOID PrintIText( struct RastPort *rp, struct IntuiText *iText,
                 LONG left, LONG top );

The rp argument is a pointer to the RastPort into which the text should be drawn. This RastPort can come from a Window or Screen structure.

The iText argument is a pointer to a list of IntuiText structures which are to be rendered. The list may contain a single IntuiText structure. If the font is not specified in the IntuiText structure, Intuition will render the text using the RastPort’s font.

The left and top arguments give the external component, or base position for this list of IntuiText structures. The LeftEdge and TopEdge values in each IntuiText structure are added to these to determine the final position of the text.

IntuiText objects may also be drawn indirectly by attaching them to gadgets, menus or requesters.

Determining Text Length

To determine the pixel length of a given IntuiText string, call the IntuiTextLength() function.

LONG IntuiTextLength( struct IntuiText *iText );

Set the iText argument to point to the IntuiText structure whose length is to be found. This function will return the length of the iText text string in pixels. Note that if the ITextFont field of the given IntuiText is set to NULL, or Intuition cannot access the specified font, then GfxBase->DefaultFont will be used in determining the length of the text. This may not be the same as the RastPort font with which the text would be printed.

IntuiText Example

/*
** intuitext.c - program to show the use of an Intuition IntuiText object.
*/
#include <exec/types.h>
#include <intuition/intuition.h>
 
#include <proto/exec.h>
#include <proto/dos.h>
#include <proto/intuition.h>
 
struct IntuitionIFace *IIntuition = NULL;
 
#define MYTEXT_LEFT (0)
#define MYTEXT_TOP  (0)
 
/*
** main routine. Open required library and window and draw the images.
** This routine opens a very simple window with no IDCMP.  See the
** articles on "Windows" and "Input and Output Methods" for more info.
** Free all resources when done.
*/
int main()
{
  struct Screen    *screen;
  struct DrawInfo  *drawinfo;
  struct Window    *win;
  struct IntuiText  myIText;
  struct TextAttr   myTextAttr;
 
  uint32 myTEXTPEN;
  uint32 myBACKGROUNDPEN;
 
  struct Library *IntuitionBase = IExec->OpenLibrary("intuition.library", 50);
  IIntuition = (struct IntuitionIFace*)IExec->GetInterface(IntuitionBase, "main", 1, NULL);
 
  if (IIntuition != NULL)
  {
    if (screen = IIntuition->LockPubScreen(NULL))
    {
      if (drawinfo = IIntuition->GetScreenDrawInfo(screen))
      {
        /* Get a copy of the correct pens for the screen.
        ** This is very important in case the user or the
        ** application has the pens set in a unusual way.
        */
        myTEXTPEN = drawinfo->dri_Pens[TEXTPEN];
        myBACKGROUNDPEN  = drawinfo->dri_Pens[BACKGROUNDPEN];
 
        /* create a TextAttr that matches the specified font. */
        myTextAttr.ta_Name  = drawinfo->dri_Font->tf_Message.mn_Node.ln_Name;
        myTextAttr.ta_YSize = drawinfo->dri_Font->tf_YSize;
        myTextAttr.ta_Style = drawinfo->dri_Font->tf_Style;
        myTextAttr.ta_Flags = drawinfo->dri_Font->tf_Flags;
 
        /* open a simple window on the workbench screen for displaying
        ** a text string.  An application would probably never use such a
        ** window, but it is useful for demonstrating graphics...
        */
        if (win = IIntuition->OpenWindowTags(NULL,
                                WA_PubScreen,    screen,
                                WA_RMBTrap,      TRUE,
                                TAG_END))
        {
          myIText.FrontPen    = myTEXTPEN;
          myIText.BackPen     = myBACKGROUNDPEN;
          myIText.DrawMode    = JAM2;
          myIText.LeftEdge    = MYTEXT_LEFT;
          myIText.TopEdge     = MYTEXT_TOP;
          myIText.ITextFont   = &myTextAttr;
          myIText.IText       = "Hello, World.  ;-)";
          myIText.NextText    = NULL;
 
          /* Draw the text string at 10,10 */
          IIntuition->PrintIText(win->RPort,&myIText,10,10);
 
          /* Wait a bit, then quit.
          ** In a real application, this would be an event loop,
          ** like the one described in the Intuition Input and
          ** Output Methods article.
          */
          IDOS->Delay(200);
 
          IIntuition->CloseWindow(win);
        }
 
        IIntuition->FreeScreenDrawInfo(screen,drawinfo);
      }
 
      IIntuition->UnlockPubScreen(NULL,screen);
    }
  }
 
  IExec->DropInterface((struct Interface*)IIntuition);
  IExec->CloseLibrary(IntuitionBase);
 
  return 0;
}

Text Colors and Drawing Modes

IntuiText gets its colors from the values set in the color registers for the screen in which they are rendered. The available number of colors and palette settings are screen attributes and cannot be changed through IntuiText rendering.

Text characters in general are made up of two areas: the character image itself and the background area surrounding the character image. The color used in each area is determined by the draw mode which can be set to JAM1, JAM2 or COMPLEMENT. The flag INVERSVID may also be specified.

JAM1 draw mode renders each character with FrontPen and leaves the background area unaffected. Because the background of a character is not drawn, the pixels of the destination memory around the character image are not disturbed. Graphics beneath the text will be visible in the background area of each character cell.

JAM2 draw mode renders each character with FrontPen and renders each character background with BackPen. Using this mode, any graphics that previously appeared beneath the character cells will be totally overwritten.

COMPLEMENT draw mode renders the pixels of each character as the binary complement of the color that is currently at the destination pixel. The destination is the display memory where the text is drawn. As with JAM1, nothing is drawn into the background. FrontPen and BackPen are not used in COMPLEMENT mode. To determine the complement color, invert all the bits in the binary representation of the color register number. The resulting number specifies the color register to use for that pixel. In a three bitplane display, for example, color 6 (110 in binary) is the complement of color 1 (001 in binary).

The INVERSVID flag inverses the video for each of the drawing modes. For JAM1, nothing is drawn into the character area and the background is drawn in FrontPen. For JAM2, the character area is drawn in BackPen and the background is drawn in FrontPen. For COMPLEMENT mode, nothing is drawn into the character area and the background is complemented.

Fonts

The application may choose to specify the font used in rendering the IntuiText, or it may choose to use the default font for the system.

To use the default font, set the ITextFont field to NULL. Some care must be taken when using the default font. When an IntuiText object is rendered and no font is specified, the text will be rendered in the font set in the RastPort.

If the RastPort font is NULL, the text will be rendered using GfxBase->DefaultFont. Also, IntuiTextLength() always uses GfxBase->DefaultFont when ITextFont is NULL. The application must have open the graphics library in order to check the default font in GfxBase. (See the graphics library article for more information.)

To use a specific font for this text, place a pointer to an initialized TextAttr structure in the ITextFont field. Intuition will only use the specified font if it is available through a call to the OpenFont() routine. To use a font from disk, the application must first open the font using the OpenDiskFont() function. For more information about using fonts, see Graphics Library and Text.

Linking Text Strings

The NextText field can point to another instance of an IntuiText structure. This allows the application to create a complex object which has several distinct groups of characters, each with its own color, font, location, and drawing mode. This can be used to create multiple lines of text, to position characters in the text very accurately and to change the color or font of the text. Each list of IntuiText objects may be drawn with one call to PrintIText(), or attached to a gadget, menu or requester as a single object.