DeskFont  -  Desktop font changer

by Tony Howat

This program is designed for RISC OS 3.5 or later.

DeskFont is a simple application written in C using Acorn's Toolbox. You will therefore need the Toolbox modules in your System directory. The modules required by this program are supplied in the Toolbox item on this disc, and you should read the instructions given there on how to install the modules on your machine.

DeskFont provides a quick method of changing the desktop font under RISC OS 3.5 without having to mess around with the Configure application. It will work on any version of RISC OS greater than 3.1, but it won't appear to do anything other than alter the Wimp$Font system variable. For DeskFont to work under RISC OS 3.5 you need to press <F12> and enter:
	Configure Wimpfont 0
at the prompt before running it for the first time. This stops the Wimp from using the CMOS font name.

The program can be run from the RISC User menu system or by double-clicking on its icon in a filer window. An icon is installed on the icon bar. Clicking Menu over this icon opens a menu with four options. Info and Quit perform their usual functions. Desktop Font leads to a submenu listing all the fonts currently available in your machine. Choosing one of these will set that font to be the desktop font. The screen will redraw, and any icon text will (hopefully) be displayed in the font you selected. Clicking Adjust on the icon bar icon at any time will reset the desktop font to Homerton.Medium (just in case things become unreadable).

The fourth menu option is Save Current Font. Choosing this option will create
a file DeskFont in your PreDesk directory which will set Wimp$Font to
the current font on boot up.

Notes
During the development of DeskFont, two bugs were discovered in the FontMenu module. The first has been circumvented (the message FontMenu_AboutToBeShown is sent too late to use fontmenu_set_font), but the second (strange errors when the user Adjust-clicks on the font menu and then Adjust-clicks again) can't be worked round without considerable bodging. However Acorn has fixed this problem in version 0.17 of FontMenu, which is included in the Issue 1 C/C++ updates disc available from Vector Services (for an administration charge) or free from ftp.acorn.co.uk (this version is also supplied on this disc in the Toolbox item). I have not seen a version of FontMenu without the first bug, but a fix has been promised.

Thanks are due to Ian Johnson (C/C++ Project Manager at Acorn) for his help.

Author:	Tony Howat
		thowat@xargle.demon.co.uk

Copyright  RISC User 1995