China DOS Union

When I am making the graphical interface of the program, I need to use many different fonts, and these fonts are all available in Windows, such as FangSong, XinWei, etc. I want to ask everyone, for the programs running under DOS (both 16-bit and 32-bit), is there a more convenient font solution to realize the display of Windows fonts?

Hope that friends who see this post can help top it. If you think this question is very naive, please also give me a little guidance in your busy schedule. Maybe a few words from you will help me a lot. Thank you.

Please go to the Chinese version to find the post where "Benshi" provided about VGA text Chinese character display!

Among 16x16 dot matrix Chinese characters under DOS, only the default SimSun font looks the best

By the way, when I use the PictureBox control to generate the character font, there is a place that feels very awkward, that is, the issue of font size. Since I need to scan the characters in the PictureBox one by one, the key point is to know how many pixels the character of this font occupies, such as 16*16 or 32*32. But the units of Windows font size are all points. So my method is to scan a character and then measure its length and width boundaries, and use this boundary as the length and width pixel values of the font for future display and scanning. I always feel this method is quite awkward, and I hope everyone can also give some pointers.

1 twip = 1/1440 inch
1 point = 1/72 inch = 20 twips

But it is more complicated to convert these units to pixels:
Horizontal 1 inch = GetDeviceCaps(hDC, LOGPIXELSX) pixels
Vertical 1 inch = GetDeviceCaps(hDC, LOGPIXELSY) pixels

GetDeviceCaps is a GDI API used to get the properties of the DC
hDC is the DC you use for drawing, such as: Picture1.hDC


So the font height is generally calculated like this:
lfHeight = PointSize * GetDeviceCaps(hDC, LOGPIXELSY) / 72


Since the Screen object's TwipsPerPixelX, TwipsPerPixelY properties can be used to know how many twips are in one pixel, so it can be calculated like this:
lfHeight = PointSize * 20 / Screen.TwipsPerPixelY

Text layout is very complicated.

You can use GetTextMetrics to obtain the text layout information of the current font, and GetOutlineTextMetrics can further obtain the text layout information of TTF fonts.

GetCharABCWidths and GetCharABCWidthsFloat can obtain the left and right hanging attributes of the font, which are used for non - monospaced fonts or italic states, allowing a part of one character to be located within the cell of another character, such as: fffffff

Use GetTextExtentPoint32 to calculate the size occupied by a string after drawing on this DC

Thank you very much. I'm sorry I'm slow-witted and didn't understand much. I'll study your post again. Thanks.

Make your own dedicated font library and writing function, or design your own CHR font.

There is a software for making CHR font libraries, which can make Chinese CHR font libraries, but each file can hold at most 255 Chinese characters.

If you make your own font, first decide whether to make a monospaced font or a proportional font. The implementation is very different!

I just noticed it's stone after replying, heh