glyphs - Man Page

Glyph files (“.glyph” extension) are used to store commonly-used bit patterns (glyphs) for Magic. Right now, the bit patterns are used for two purposes in Magic. First, they specify patterns for programmable cursors:  each cursor shape (e.g. the arrow used for the wiring tool) is read in as a glyph from a glyph file. Second, glyphs are used by the window manager to represent the icons displayed at the ends of scroll bars. Glyph file names normally have the extension .glyph.

Glyph files are stored in ASCII format. Lines beginning with “#” are considered to be comments and are ignored. Blank lines are also ignored. The first non-comment line in a glyph file must have the syntax size nGlyphs width height The nGlyphs field must be a number giving the total number of glyphs stored in the file. The width and height fields give the dimensions of each glyph in pixels. All glyphs in the same file must have the same size.

The size line is followed by a description for each of the glyphs. Each glyph consists of height lines each containing 2×width characters. Each pair of characters corresponds to a bit position in the glyph, with the leftmost pair on the topmost line corresponding to the upper-left pixel in the glyph.

The first character of each pair specifies the color to appear in that pixel. The color is represented as as a single character, which must be the short name of a display style in the current display style file. Some commonly-used characters are K for black, W for white, and . for the background color (when . is used in a cursor, it means that that pixel position is transparent:  the underlying picture appears through the cursor). See “Magic Maintainer's Manual #3: Display Styles, Color Maps, and Glyphs” for more information.

The second character of each pair is normally blank, except for one pixel per glyph which may contain a “*” in the second character. The “*” is used for programmable cursors to indicate the hot-spot:  the pixel corresponding to the “*” is the one that the cursor is considered to point to.

For an example of a glyph file, see ∼cad/lib/magic/sys/color.glyphs.

magic(1), dstyle(5)

dstyle(5), magic(1).