Next: Printers and Plotters Up: Technical Talk Previous: Technical Talk
Next: Printers and Plotters
Up: Technical Talk
Previous: Technical Talk
FEMGV assumes that X Windows backing store is available. This is an X server function which maintains obscured portions of your windows and automatically redraws them for you when they become unobscured. This facility obviously incurs a performance penalty and for this reason Silicon Graphics actively recommend that it is not used. However, if you feel that you need it you can usually turn it on via a switch on the X server initialisation command. This command is known by a variety of names; Xsgi for Silicon Graphics, xinit for IBM RS/6000, etc.. The best thing to do is to start by typing the command man Xserver and take it from there!
Yes. FEMGV supports the xterm style of cut/paste interaction. Pressing the middle mouse button whilst in the FEMGV window (with the exclamation mark cursor visible), will cause the program to copy the contents of the X Windows cut buffer 0 into the FEMGV input area. You can select text in your X client window using the lefthand mouse button. See xterm for more details. It is not yet possible to cut from the FEMGV window and paste into another client.
A major problem with earlier releases of the FEMGV X Windows driver was the handling of colour, and in particular, the interference with other windows. The latest driver attempts to address these problems; the following notes explain how the present driver works and also describe some of the problems you may still encounter.
However, if you do experience interference with other windows then the most likely cause is that the program is using a colour table other than the default one; this is probably because the default colour table is insufficient for our requirements. You will need to find out the visual class being used by FEMGV and restart your X Server with this as the default visual class. There is an environment variable called FV_DEBUG, which when set to True, will print out some 'useful' information - but now is probably a good time to contact your FEMGV dealer!!
The downside of this default setting is that FEMGV may not be able to find enough free cells in order to set up all of it's required colours. The way the colour table setting works is like this; we try to find an exact match to our required colour by looking through the existing colour table. If we find one, then we use it, if not, and there are free cells in the colour table then we allocate our colour into a free cell. If there is not an exact match, and there are no free cells then we search the colour table for the nearest colour. So it all depends on what colours already exist and how many free cells there are - we may or may not be able to get an adequate match for all of our required colours. Failure to find a good match is usually limited to the Blue and Violet shading palettes.
If the colour matching is still inadequate for your requirements then you do have the option of forcing the exact colours by setting the resource ExactColours to True
This way we create a private colourmap and just set the exact colours that we need. This means that our window looks great, but all of the others will most likely be illegible. Once again, there is not much to be done here, that's how it is! You can make life a bit easier by always starting FEMGV from an xterm window created via
xterm -sb -fg black -bg white &
this will at least ensure that the FEMGV dialogue is legible.
FEMGV uses up to five fonts, typically 12 point and 10 point proportionally spaced for the GUI and monospaced for annotation.
The fonts are used as follows:-
| LargeFont | Window titles, command input line, annotation. |
| SmallFont | Annotation in multiviewport mode. |
| GUIFont | Menu column, scrolling alpha area, monitor box, model index. |
| SmallGUIFont | Monitor box and model index in multiviewport mode. |
| FormFont | Pop-up forms. |
The program selects the fonts as follows:
*courier-medium-r-normal-*-120-*-m-*
and use the first one found.
Similarly for SmallFont, GUIFont and SmallGUIFont
If you do not like the font that is being used then it is possible for you to change it as follows:
Having selected your preferred fonts you should set the font resources accordingly.
These resources are:
A simple way of selecting fonts when using a Silicon Graphics machine is to open a winterm window and use the in-built font selector. To activate this you need to press and hold the right mouse button, slide down to the Font.. option and release the button.
Having selected your preferred fonts you should set the font resources accordingly.
These resources are:
Currently, the following fonts may be changed from the given defaults:
| MSWindows.LargeFont | Fixedsys.Regular.Bold.10 |
| MSWindows.SmallFont | Courier New.Regular.Medium.7 |
| MSWindows.GUIFont | Arial.Regular.Bold.10 |
| MSWindows.SmallGUIFont | Small Fonts.Regular.Bold.7 |
If you use the command line argument -DefaultFonts when running FEMGV the View/Font Editor menu will display the default fonts rather than the one stored in the Registry. In this way it is possible to reinstate the original settings.
Femsys Limited