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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: WinFrotz color bugs
Message-ID: <GHs8ED.11L@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 03:59:01 GMT
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Magnus Olsson <mol@df.lth.se> wrote:
>Sean T Barrett <buzzard@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Playing games written for a virtual machine which supports underlining
>>and italics in a text-mode window which doesn't support underlining
>>and italics is stupid, evil and wrong.
>
>a) the Z machine doesn't, and never has, supported underlining
>*and* italics - the spec talks about underlining (or at least Inform
>does), and some terps display "underlined" text as underlined,
>some as italics, some as coloured, and some don't distinguish it
>from ordinary text.

Sorry, I braino'd... when I started typing that I meant to say
"bold and italics". These are, I'm pretty sure, the name of the
styles in the zspec. Inform renamed italics to 'underline'.

>b) you're losing historical context here. Think of the variety
>of hardware and OSs to which the original Imps ported the Z machine,
>and their various ways of displaying text.

That wasn't my point. I was (in my head) drawing a disctinction
between "playing a game on a console" (e.g. under DOS) and
"playing a game in a console window" (e.g. in a Windows DOS box)
and only referring to the latter, since the prior poster had
reviled "non-console *windows*" (emphasis mine).

>Agreed, and if WinFrotz had done a better job at displaying colours,
>nobody would need to use both.

I'm not sure it's really "better", since it's probably pretty
consistent with the zspec for text to be unreadable if foreground
color and background color are the same. That's why I'm not certain
whether it's better for my revised one to always force bold to
toggle the foreground brightness (as DosFrotz does) or to just
toggle the foreground brightness if foreground color = background
color. My inclination is to clone DosFrotz behavior, but there's
something to be said for guaranteeing the text is always readable.

SeanB
