Large Text in STOS
                               ==================
                                       By

                                 ScoTT STringer
                                 --------------

     Ever seen those great  big  letters  in  STOS  programs and wished you
     could use them in your own programs ?? Well, you can.

     On  this  months  ICTARI magazine disk you'll  find  a  program called
     HI_FONT6.BAS  which  is  my  very  own-just-finished   creation  which
     allows you to create your own large fonts.

     The  font definer that comes  with  STOS  won't let  you  create these
     larger  fonts unless you've got a high  resolution  screen.  That's  a
     bit tough on most of  us,   so  I  figured  out how  to  edit existing
     fonts and wrote this program to make the job easy !

     To  run the program,  simply boot up  STOS and load & run  the program
     as you would any STOS  Basic  program.   The  operation of the definer
     is  all  detailed  onscreen,   so  if  you  follow   the instructions,
     you'll have no problems.  Fonts are saved to disk as   *.MBK  files as
     this is the only format that STOS recognises for fonts.

     There are three sample fonts on the  disk,  all by Sean Ellis.  Modify
     these  as you'd like,   but  remember  to  save  them   to  disk under
     another name or you'll wipe the original !

     The program works in  medium  resolution,   so  you'll find  that when
     you use these fonts in low resolution they appear  TWICE  as wide, but
     the same depth.

     Any fonts that you create might  be  very useful for other STOS users,
     so  how about sending your  creations  to  next months ICTARI magazine
     disk ??    You'll be instantly  famous,  and  lots  of people will  be
     able to gawp at your brilliant letters  in  future  STOS programs.

     Finally,  a note on how to  get  your  font on screen.   Load the font
     from disk into bank #5 of  your  STOS program.   Next,  open  a window
     and set the last variable  to  number  4,   this represents the loaded
     font.  Because you're using a particularly  huge  font,  it's easy  to
     open a window that's too large,   remember that the  window takes  its
     size by the number of letters  in  width and  depth  that you specify,
     and the loaded font is larger than you usually  use. Anything  you now
     print inside the window will appear in  the  new font.  Brilliant eh ?

     You can look up  the  STOS  manual  (page  169  -  Character Sets) for
     further  information on how  to  fiddle   about  with  character sets.
     They're easier to figure out than they look.

     Until next time...,