1. (WINDOWS) New GDI printing commands for color printers:
//SETTEXTCOLOR,R,G,B
//SETBKCOLOR,R,G,B
//SETBRUSH,STYLE,HATCH,R,G,B
//SETPEN,STYLE,THICKNESS,R,G,B
In all of the above, R,G,B refers to a set of RED-GREEN-BLUE values each of which ranges from 0-255. You can use these to specify virtually any color (whether or not your printer actually supports it.) To figure out the values for special colors, you can use the Settings..Colors dialog in A-Shell. Click on a color, then select the Define Custom Color button and you will see a dialog which allows you to select any color from a 3 dimensional grid. (The 3rd dimension is a slide bar on the right side that controls lightness and darkness.) As you move the color cursor around, you will see the R,G,B values changing. (Don't confuse them with the Hue, Sat, and Lum values, which are part of an alternative system of defining colors.) Some common R,G,B color values are:
255,255,255 white
0,0,0 black
255,0,0 red
0,255,0 green
0,0,255 blue
192,192,192 gray
//SETTEXTCOLOR sets the color to be used for subsequent text output.
//SETBKCOLOR sets the background color to be used for subsequent text output. The default is 255,255,255 (white) which is taken as transparent. Any other setting will cause a ribbon of background color to be written along with any text. (For example, this would be necessary in order to print white on blue.)
//SETBRUSH can be used to define the current brush which is used to fill in rectangles and ellipses. This will happen only when you specify that the rectangle or ellipse is to be filled with light gray, gray, or darkgray. (The defined brush will be used instead of the gray.) The brush styles are:
0 Solid 1 Null or hollow (negates effect of SETBRUSH) 2 Hatched (see HATCH parameter values below) The HATCH options are: 0 Horizontal lines (-----) 1 Vertical lines (|||||) 2 Diagonal lines (\\\\\) 3 Diagonal lines (/////) 4 Crosshatch (+++++) 5 Diag crosshatch (xxxxx)
Note that these patterns may not actually end up printing as cleanly as the theory would suggest, particularly on inkjet printers.
//SETPEN,STYLE,THICKNESS,R,G,B was implemented previously but now we have added the optional R,G,B parameters to allow you to specify the line color which will be used in subsequent LINETO, RECTANGLE, and ELLIPSE commands.
Note that results may be less than desirable when using color commands on a monochrome color. For example, newer laser printers will translate the colors to shades of gray, which may result in very light print, depending on the color.
A new sample file, GDICLR.TXT is included in the release in [7,366] which you can print to a printer (using PASSTHROUGH=OFF) to demo the new color capabilities.
2. (WINDOWS) The SWITCHES parameter of XCALL SPOOL and XCALL EZSPL now supports two new values: 32768 (Landscape) and 65536 (Portrait)
When used with a printer and PASSTHROUGH=OFF, this will override the ORIENTATION setting, if any, in the printer's INI and force the specified orientation. (Note that you could accomplish the same thing by defining two printer INI's, one for each orientation, but this does have the advantage of reducing the number of printer configurations you have to keep track of.)
3. A new command, ABOUT.LIT is now included with the release. This program display information about the current license (licensee, licensed options, expiration date, nodes, etc.) similar to what the Help..About box in A-Shell/Windows displays. (It is therefore mainly useful under the UNIX versions of A-Shell, which previously did not offer any easy way to see when your maintenance license expired.) There is one optional switch, /L, which causes the information to be written to a file, ABOUT.LST. See the next item about the update LITMSG.xxx file.
4. LITMSG.USA and the corresponding versions for other languages has been updated to include the messages used in ABOUT.LIT. Eventually this file will contain all of the messages for all of the LIT commands but we have admittedly been going rather slowly about it. (If anyone would like to contribute to this project, please send us translated versions of the English messages which appear in any of the existing LIT commands.)
5. XINNOE.SBR (OmniLedger) now supports up to 200 character long input strings. Previously, the length was limited to the difference between the current cursor column and the width of the screen.
6. (UNIX) XCALL MIAMEX,92{,ON} may now be used to disable and re-enable the PolyShell hot keys. When the 2nd parameter is not specified or is zero, it disables the hot keys; otherwise it re-enables them. This might be useful in situations where using the hot key causes a problem in a particular context (perhaps while running an AUTLOG session for example.)
7. There is a new message file, SYSMSG.xxx (xxx=USA, UK, FRE, etc.) which will contain system messages that are used by A-Shell but which don't really fall into the category of error messages. Currently the only messages defined in that file are used by the print-screen prompt, but the file will grow over time. (Again, any non-English users that want to accelerate this process can email us translations of the A-Shell system messages they would most like to see in their native language.)
8. The print screen operation (Control-P) now provides an option of associating a short comment message with the screen picture (similar in manner to the print screen function of PolyTrack under AMOS.) Some people find this handy for tech support (i.e. teach your users to hit Control-P, add a comment to explain the problem, print it, and fax it to you.) Others may find it happy for creating training documents. (Just run the app, taking pictures and adding notes as you go to explain a procedure. In this case, you may want to take advantage of the ability to append several screen pictures into one file by entering an invalid printer option (or one that uses device PROMPT:) to prevent each page from printing separately.
9. (UNIX) The print spooling operation now includes a workaround for a rare and bizarre problem encountered under Red Hat in which the lpr command fails due to a "max_file" error.
10. INMEMO will now return a 0 link if passed an invalid link, after logging details about it to ashell.log. (Since in 99% of the cases, the best or only solution for an invalid link is to zero it out, this helps applications that don't check the returned status codes to be more self-maintaining. In the 1% of cases where you didn't want to zero the link, some action on the part of a technician was required anyway, at which time he/she can get the original link info from the ashell.log file.)
11. DATEPK.SBR now accepts pretty much any non-numeric character as a separator when converting string dates to other formats. For example, 05.03^1999 is now just as acceptable as 05/03/1999.
12. (WINDOWS) Include VICTOREX subroutines (version 2.9): FLOCK0, STRIPS, ULOCKS, RLOCKS, OLOCKS, COMON1, LPTCHK, XZIP, DSPACE, NULL, GETRUN, SBRVER.
13. Add SBR=INP_TTI flag to implement alternate behaviour in INPUTC relating to way INXCTL is set (for TTI).
14. Error message displayed when a system message is not found now includes expected message file name (making it easier to interpret.)
15. XINPUT.SBR now properly handles numbers > 2^31.
16. Fix bug in INFLD in which it was not automatically setting date format for TYPE D to DDYYMM (based on LDF) when SBR=INFDEF was specified in MIAME.INI.
