Program: TI-89 Font Editor Package
Version: 1.0
Author: Michael McElroy (lord_nightrose@yahoo.com)

The TI-89 font editor is the culmination of over 100 hours of coding, refining, and testing. It allows you to create and edit user-defined font files on the calculator itself, as well as use these fonts to draw text on the graph screen.

You'll notice two main folders with program files in them. The 'essential files' folder contains only the files you need to run the program. The 'optional files' folder contains optional add-on files test programs. The latter is not needed to run the program.

It would be a good idea to turn the axes off on the graph; it's not necessary, but it makes the interface look better.

OK, now for the program itself. To create a font, run 'newfont("name",height,width,"description")'. The name is the variable name for the font. It would be a good idea to precede this with "fonts\", since the fontedit() program only looks for fonts in the 'fonts' folder. The height and width can be anywhere from 1 to 8 each; the program isn't designed to handle a larger font. The description is the font's internal name used as a description for the fontedit() program. It must be at least one character long.


There are actually two main ways to edit a font:

1. Run 'fontedit()'. This is the GUI-based program that lets you select fonts from a list. If there are no fonts installed, it will tell you this and exit the program. When you select a font from the list, the program loads the font's information and displays it in a dialog. To edit that font, press 'enter'; or press cancel to pick another. If you choose to edit that font, you are then taken to the glyph selection screen. Each of the 255 TI-89 font characters are drawn on the screen; use the arrow keys to select the glyph you want to edit. Press enter to pick the glyph. Now, you are taken to the core of the editor itself.

2. The other way to get to the core of the editor is to run the program 'fe(font,glyph)', where 'font' is the font you want to edit (in a string) and 'glyph' is the single-character string containing the character to edit.

Either method is the same at this point. The glyph (if it has been defined already) will be read and drawn in a small box. The box's size is limited to the size of the glyph. To the right, the glyph is drawn at triple size. To toggle a pixel on and off, move the cursor (the black dot in the small box that moves with the arrow keys) and press the [ENTER] button. To cancel the editing, press [ESC], and to save the glyph, press [F1]. Pressing F1 will clear the glyph's contents and give you a clean slate.


To write on the graph screen with your fonts, run the program 'type("font","text",x,y)'. It will draw the text in the font you specify at pixel (x,y). Note that this is not the same as point (x,y); pixel (x,y) is located x pixels down the left side and y pixels across the top.


That's it! Hopefully you guys will find some use for the fonts you can make with this program. I've included a few of my own; only the 'big' font really has much of anything in it. It is completed up to the lower-case letter 'm' (the 109th character of 255 characters). Enjoy!

Please feel free to send me any comments or questions about this or any of my other programs.