True Type Font Support

After all these years I think I'm finally satisfied with the way True-Type scaleable fonts are working. So click the Use True Type option at the top left of the Font Options dialog and try that out if you are interested:

When Vista can't find a font that fits well to the screen size and terminal size, it chooses the nearest smaller font and fills the rest of the screen with a gray background. With TrueType fonts, we can choose any x/y font size, so that gray area can become much smaller. Here's an example of a mod5 on my 1280x1024 screen with some area lost because of the task bar, Raster to the left, TrueType to the right (click on thumbnails for full image):

There is still some gray area with the TrueType font, but far less than the nearest available Vista Raster font.

Another problem I hope I fixed with this version is what I call "Font Creep". Because Vista saves the window size and calculates the font size based on that size each time the window is displayed, there can sometimes be some creep, such as this example:

In the images above, note that I added the &fontsize variable to the Status Line so we can see it at the bottom left.

We start at the left with a mod-4 screen set to 13x18 and I'm happy with that screen and font size. Then the mainframe switches to mod-2 for whatever reason. Vista changes the font size to match the nearest font it has to the fill the mod-4 window size, but comes up with a bit smaller window, because there are a limited number of raster font sizes available. Then we switch back to mod-4, but wait a second - now Vista calculated the mod-4 font size based on the mod-2 size window, and comes up smaller than the original 13x18 font that we were happy with. Then we switch modes again and we're back to 13x26. So in this example, we become "stabilized" between 13x26 and 13x14. But that's not what the I wanted.

One workaround for this is to specify Keep Font Constant on Mode Switch, but that might not be what the user wanted either. And oddly, this font creep issue can actually get a lot worse with TrueType fonts, because there are so many more font sizes to choose from. Without addressing this issue, the font could keep creeping down multiple times before it gets stabilized.

To try to solve this problem with some previous TrueType test versions, I added an option to save the window size with each mode switch. But that turned out to cause more problems. This time I'm saving the font size only on the mode switch, going back to the saved font when we switch back. We'll see how this goes.

The default TrueType font is IBM 3270 which is pretty good. But you can try whatever other fixed pitch TrueType fonts you might have on your PC. Also included are some VistaTN3270 TrueType fonts I made. But those lack something called "font hinting" which keeps them from looking good at smaller scales. So I'd recommend something else. P.S. If anyone knows how to do hinting with Fontographer please train me.

File Upload Options

Added File Transfer Upload options for space allocation and DCB items like LRECL and RECFM.

Hopefully these can save you some pre-allocation work, which was about the only way to handle this in previous Vista versions other than the (unsupported) V2.00 version

Format as HTML

At the lower left of the General Options dialog there is a new Format as HTML option. If you select that, and then use one of the screen saving functions such as the File/Save-Screen-To-Disk menu or the Capture function, the filename vista.html (by default) will be saved with HTML instead of the normal TXT. That can be viewed with a browser, such as this html I saved and then copied into this web page:

File Edit Edit_Settings Menu Utilities Compilers Test Help ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EDIT TED013.T.ASM(DSCBMOD) - 01.01 Columns 00001 00072 Command ===> Scroll ===> CSR ****** ***************************** Top of Data ****************************** 000100 //TED013A JOB (TE00TBRENN,DK4D),T.BRENNAN,NOTIFY=TED013, 000200 // TIME=(,15),MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),COND=(0,NE) 000300 /*ROUTE PRINT HOLD0 000400 //* 000500 //********************************************************************* 000600 //* ASSEMBLE AND LINK DSCBMOD 000700 //********************************************************************* 000800 //* 000900 //ASM EXEC ASMHCL, 001000 // PARM.ASM='OBJECT,NODECK,XREF(SHORT),USING(WARN(11))', 001100 // PARM.LKED='LIST,LET,XREF,AC=1' 001200 //ASM.SYSLIB DD DSN=SYS1.MACLIB,DISP=SHR 001300 // DD DSN=SYS1.AMODGEN,DISP=SHR 001310 // DD DSN=TED013.T.MACLIB,DISP=SHR 001400 //ASM.SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*,DCB=BUFNO=1 001500 //LKED.SYSLMOD DD DSN=TED013.T.LOAD(DSCBMOD),UNIT=,VOL=,DISP=SHR 001600 //LKED.SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*,DCB=(RECFM=FB,BLKSIZE=3509,BUFNO=1) 001610 //ASM.SYSIN DD * 001700 DSCBMOD TITLE 'DSCBMOD - MODIFY BITS IN A DSCB THRU TSO' 001800 *********************************************************************** 001900 * * 002000 * CSECT NAME - DSCBMOD * 002100 * * 002200 * ORIGINAL MARK THOMEN * 002300 * AUTHOR I.R.C.C. * 002400 * 1971 NEIL AVE., * 002500 * OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY *

This could make mainframe application documentation a bit easier, especially if you use web doc. FYI - the code used to generate the HTML output was somewhat copied from a Vista macro created by Doug Nadel in 1999. You may remember him from his work at IBM with ISPF.