Custom Text Formatting (Previously: Getting long results in a program)

[komame]

(05-05-2024 03:41 PM)Guenter Schink Wrote:  When I look at the syntax for DIMGROB, it seems pretty clear how to create a grob with a few numbers. The example in the HELP seems to be easy to follow. But in the ICON statement, I can't see any structure, only a sequence of arbitrary? length.

Perhaps someone can shed some light on it.
Anyway thanks for your effort.

Hi Günter,

When using the DIMGROB command, graphical data is provided directly, byte by byte. However, with ICON, the situation is quite different because internally, it's a graphic file in the "png" format, which, like "jpg", is a compressed format. Therefore, you can't extract individual pixels from it directly, as they take up much less space after compression. If you were to save a "png" file created in any graphic editor on a PC and then convert it to hexadecimal format, you would get something similar to what we input for ICON.

An icon with dimensions 10x10 looks like this:
ICON name 89504E470D0A1A0A0000000D494844520000000A0000000A0100000000A549F2100000000274524E​5300010194FDAE000000184944415478017DC2010D0000008320FBA77A336D7006EE0C0752117786​35152C0000000049454E44AE426082;
while an icon with dimensions 1000x10 looks like this:
ICON name 89504E470D0A1A0A0000000D49484452000003E80000000A01000000000FBC495D0000000274524E​5300010194FDAE0000001E494441547801EDCD310100000C0220FB97DE5AE80305C82DD9ED767BC7​03E048DD5B5690EF480000000049454E44AE426082;
As you can see, a 100 times larger area occupies just a few bytes more, thanks to compression.

The advantage of ICON is that you can draw on it similarly to G0-G9. As you probably know, the values of local variables declared outside the body of any function in PPL are stored between individual program runs and are reset to their initial values only when you enter the source code, which ends with its compilation (or after manually executing a "check").
If you change the content of ICON during program execution (drawing on it), it remains changed similarly to PPL variables until you recompile the source code again (check). The disadvantage of ICON compared to G0-G9 is that the image size cannot be dynamically changed during program execution, so what you declare in the source code remains at the same size, and to change it, you need to edit the source code.

As Tyann mentioned, you can generate the hexadecimal string for ICON using the DIMGROBHelper:
https://www.hpcalc.org/details/7472