ID:HR Hercules Monographics Plus and InColor Card
(with RAMFONT)
Quarterdeck Technical Note #137
by Stan Young

DESQview 2.0 and above supports the original Hercules Monographics
card both in text and graphics mode.

Hercules has two cards called the Hercules Monographics Plus Card
and the InColor Card that have an additional feature that Hercules
calls "RAMFONT."  While DESQview supports the cards in the original
Hercules text and graphics modes, DESQview is not compatible with
the RAMFONT feature of the cards.  We have done considerable
investigation to see if we could support RAMFONT and have consulted
with the Hercules developers, but the answer seems to be that
RAMFONT is unsupportable in the sense that we support other video
standards.

The problem is that RAMFONT allows software to load a custom
character set into the card and then addresses this character set
as if addressing a normal text character set.  Since this custom
character set can appear any way the developer designs it, it can 
allow for italics, boldface and large fonts to be shown on the 
screen without going into graphics mode.  This method has some 
speed advantages over running in bit-mapped graphics mode.

Unfortunately, while these cards were designed to allow developers
to load the card with fonts of their own design,  there does not
appear to be any way for developers to determine the current state
of the card, read the font information that might be stored in the
card, or in any way do what we at Quarterdeck refer to as a "save
and restore" of the card.  Since this character set is global, once
an application loads in one of these custom character sets, these
new characters will appear in other application windows and
DESQview menus.  This can cause information to become unreadable.

Possible solutions and work-arounds:

1.  Configure your program to operate in either standard text or 
Hercules Graphics (720 by 348) mode.  If your application allows 
you to configure the type of graphics card you are using, selecting
IBM Monochrome or Hercules Monographics (without RAMFONT) should
cause the program to operate correctly in DESQview.

2.  Put the program that uses RAMFONT into a state in which it does
not use RAMFONT before switching windows.  For instance, if you use
WordPerfect 5.0's "Exit to DOS" feature before switching windows,
WordPerfect will load in the standard character set and then reload
RAMFONTs when you return to WordPerfect.  Presumably, any program
that has an exit-to-DOS feature could disable and reenable RAMFONT
in this fashion.
DESQview 2.+ Technical Note                  Page 2

HERCULES MONOGRAPHICS PLUS CARD and InColor CARD
(with RAMFONT)

3.  If your program automatically detects RAMFONT and this support
cannot be disabled, and the program has some method for redrawing
its screen, you can use the program RAMFONT.COM that comes with the
RAMFONT card in a DESQview DOS window to re-establish the original
IBM character set.  To do this, you would just type RAMFONT at the
DOS prompt (this process could be activated by a DESQview macro on
the main menu).  This will restore the normal character set for
DESQview and your other programs.  However, when you return to the
program that uses RAMFONT, you will find that its screen is not
correct.  By hitting the keystrokes necessary to redraw the screen,
you can then re-establish RAMFONT for the program.  In Microsoft
Word, for instance, you can re-establish RAMFONT by hitting
CTRL-SHIFT-\.

        Copyright (C) 1991 by Quarterdeck Office Systems
             * * *   E N D   O F   F I L E    * * *