                       Font handling utility collection
                       ================================


What is it?
-----------
These 4 little DOS programs help handling VGA Fonts in MS-DOS.
Their creation was motivated by Edward Mendelson who had the problem that his
current video adapter was failing. This adapter had a decent VGA ROM font and
also a continous underline function. Newer adapters have an uglier ROM font
and some don't have a continous underine.
So to preserve the old, good-looking ROM font, SAVEFONT and LOADFONT utilities
were made which can save a VGA ROM font from an adapter to a file and restore
the font from file. So by saving the good-looking ROM font from the old
adapter card, it is possible on a new VGA card to use the same ROM font by
temporarily restoring it to the ROM font buffer area of the card before using
the desired application.

Now for the underline problem, there cannot be done much if on Monochrome
video mode 7, but in VGA mode, it is possible to set the caracter width from
9 to 8 pixels which causes the underline for a character to be continous.
This can be done with 8DOTCHR utility. The underline attribute is not 
available in VGA mode (as attribute bits are used for colors there), but 
WordPerfect can use the capability of the VGA card to display 2 fonts at the
same time and provides an underline VGA font. However this font may not look
like the ROM font of the VGA card. To overcome this problem, CRUND can use the
ROM font previously dumped with SAVEFONT and convert it to WordPerfect 
VGAUND.FRS file which contains the underlined character font so that both
fonts are equal.

The utilities
-------------
SAVEFONT	-	Save currently loaded VGA font to given file 
LOADFONT	-	Loads font from saved file to VGA adapter
8DOTCHR		-	Enables 8dot character mode in VGA mode
CRUND		-	Convert saved font file to vgaund.frs file for WP

Usage should be self explanatory.
Please note that VGA font and 8/9 character mode gets reset after VGA mode
switch, therefore use these utilities after you switch mode (i.e. with 
VMODE utility).
The runnable utilities can be found in the BIN directory.

Compiling
---------
The Assembler sourcecode of the utilities is in the SRC directory.
You can compile them using Borland Turbo Assembler (TASM) with:

TASM utility.ASM
TLINK /t utility.ASM

Author
------
Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Ludwig Ertl
mailto: ludwig.ertl@dose.0wnz.at


You can get my other useful DOS-Utilities here:
http://www.waldbauer.com/tmp/reference.php

License
-------
This Application and Sourcecode may be distributed freely.
The Sourcecode is Licensed in Terms of the GNU GPL v3.
See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Modify it as you like, but give me the credits ;)

Thanks
------
Thanks to all the users who are still using DOS Applications ;)
