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AuthorForum: PowerVT
Topic: How to display ASCII control characters
Tom Hancock
thancock@opwfms.com

From: Hodgkins, IL USA
Posts: 5
Member Since: 02/07/06
posted March 2, 2007 11:52 AM

I need to display the ASCII control characters. You know, the little heart and smiley faces, etc. 0x01 through 0x1f. I need to display them with the regular Terminal font. How do I do this?
Raj

From: Rome, NY, USA
Posts: 389
Member Since: 02/01/06
posted March 7, 2007 10:54 AM

Hi Tom,

I do not see any of those symbols in the charmap (start -- run -- charmap) for the Terminal Font. So, you will not be able to show those using this font.

However, if there would have been symbols in a font, those can be displayed on the VT Screen using the following:
Vt1.Display Chr(asciiValue)

Regards,
Raj
Tom Hancock
thancock@opwfms.com

From: Hodgkins, IL USA
Posts: 5
Member Since: 02/07/06
posted March 7, 2007 12:10 PM

Well, you used to be able to insert these control characters into any text editor by holding down the Alt key and entering the ascii value. This doesn't seem to work anymore :(

Here they are here (hope this displays in your browser):

☺☻♥♦♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓

If you want to see them, you can try one of these:

Open Excel, change the font of one of the cells to "Terminal", then enter the formula =CHAR(1) and you will see the little smiley face. =CHAR(3) and you see the little heart.

You can also see these glyphs if you create a text file with the ascii chars 0x01 through 0x1f and then edit the file with notepad or "type" the file in a DOS window.

I have tried the vt1.Display method, but this does not work.

Since these glyphs are not in the charmap, I will assume that they cannot be displayed, unless you can tell me differently.
Raj

From: Rome, NY, USA
Posts: 389
Member Since: 02/01/06
posted March 8, 2007 1:15 PM

I am not sure why or how Excel and dos interpret those values, but if you can make those characters to show up using their ASCII values through VB/.NET, I would be in a position to look deeper into this. This is so because the Dart tool uses ASCII values of the characters.
[Vt1.Display Chr(asciiValue)]

Now, regarding the Alt + key-sequence, this does not seem to be implemented. I have written this up as issue # 4282. Please get in touch with David Harry (sales@dart.com) to check on the status of this.

Thanks,
Raj
Tom Hancock
thancock@opwfms.com

From: Hodgkins, IL USA
Posts: 5
Member Since: 02/07/06
posted March 8, 2007 2:04 PM

Thanks for your efforts. My customers do not need the ability to enter these values into the Vt1 control, I just need to display the values.

I have been looking through some docs on the original VT* terminals, and there are statements there that say they DO NOT display ascii values 0x01 to 0x1f. If so, it may be that your VT emulator's emulation machinery will not permit the display. In this case I will give up and just remap the characters to something that will display.
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