RIP graphics: icons and text blocks

RIPscrip (“RIP”) lets a board draw pictures, buttons and clickable areas on a caller's screen instead of plain text. ProBoard v4 sends RIP to callers whose terminal says it can show it. PBTerm can, when its phonebook entry has the terminal type RIP.

This page covers the parts of RIP that were added later: icons and blocks of text.

An icon is a small picture stored in an .ICN file (a few boards also use files ending in .HIC and similar for the highlighted look of a button). RIP screens and buttons use them for the pictures on menu buttons.

Where the icons live. Put your icon files in the folder set as RIP icons on the Options > Paths page of PBConfig. The caller's terminal keeps its own copy.

How a caller gets them. Every time a RIP caller logs in, ProBoard asks the terminal which of your icons it does not have yet. It sends the missing ones with Zmodem. PBTerm takes them without asking where to put them and stores them in a RIPicons folder next to PBTerm.exe. The first call therefore takes a little longer, depending on how many icons you have; the next ones skip the icons the terminal already has. If you change an icon, delete the old copy from the RIPicons folder.

What PBTerm draws. An icon is drawn where the RIP screen says (command |1I: position, how it combines with the picture underneath, and an optional copy to the clipboard). A button can carry an icon as well: its text is written icon<>label<>command. With a label the icon sits above it. Without a label the icon is centred in the button.

If an icon is missing on the caller's side, that picture is simply not drawn. The rest of the screen works.

A RIP screen can put a paragraph of text in a rectangle instead of positioning every line itself. The command |1T sets the rectangle, each |1t adds a paragraph that is wrapped to the width of the rectangle (and, if asked, spread to fill the full width), and |1E ends the block. Text that does not fit in the rectangle is cut off. The text uses the current colour and RIP font size.

PBTerm draws block text in the Borland stroked font for the chosen RIP font number when the Borland .CHR files (TRIP, LITT, SANS, GOTH and so on) are in the Fonts folder next to PBTerm. They are not supplied with ProBoard; without them it uses its 8×8 font.

• Your own .RIP screens made with RIP editors can use |1I, |1T, |1t and |1E. They are sent to RIP callers as they are.
• Plug-ins draw RIP through the host's sendRip. The RIP builder in the shared plug-in header (Plugins\Shared\pbscreen.hpp) now has Icon() and TextBlock() next to the line, bar and text calls.
• Inside ProBoard, the helpers rip_icon() and rip_text_block() send the same commands.

• No icons appear. Check that the RIP icons path in PBConfig points at a folder with your icon files, and that the phonebook entry for the board in PBTerm has the terminal type RIP. Look in the RIPicons folder next to PBTerm.exe: it fills as the first call goes on.
• Games or screens show plain text. RIP was probably not switched on for that call. The ProBoard log line Plugin host: RIP ON or off says whether the caller's terminal answered the RIP query, and if not, why.