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text.dat file
Much of the text and color that the BBS Terminal Server displays is stored in the file
ctrl/text.dat
file. The syntax of this file is VERY specific and
extreme caution should be taken when editing it. Knowledge of the C language
would be very helpful in producing the desired results. If all you want to
do is change colors of a certain text line, take care not to disturb the
arrangement of the other characters on the line. Ctrl-A codes can be preceded
by an embedded actually Ctrl-A (ASCII 0x01) character or by a '\1'
(the printf() equivalent of Ctrl-A).
The syntax of the characters between the double quotations is identical to the C language printf() format string with one exception: \xxx where x are digits (0-9) represents a decimal number, not an octal number. The range is 0 to 255. If you wish to set a background color using \1 for the Ctrl-A code, you may need to pad the attribute number with zeroes. For example; to set the background to blue, you might try to use the sequence “\14” which won't work. You could either embed the actual ctrl-a character (which is preferred) or use “\0014”.
Some of the strings have characters preceded by a tilde ('~'). These strings
are referred to as mnemonics. The tilde precedes a character that is to be
highlighted for users supporting ANSI and enclosed in parenthesis for non-ANSI
users. Usually used for prompt strings that contain the valid key commands.
The colors to use for the highlighted characters, normal characters, and the
command character are specified in the ctrl/attr.cfg
file.
The order of the % specifiers (if they exist) in a text.dat
line cannot be
altered. The display of %s specifiers can be suppressed by changing the “%s”
to
“%.0s”
. Another way to suppress the display of specifiers is to enclose them
between Ctrl-A( and Ctrl-A). Any text between Ctrl-A( and Ctrl-A) would only
be displayed to users of level 90 or higher. To suppress the display to all
users, put the text/specifiers between Ctrl-ACtrl-Z and Ctrl-A) (assuming
that the Z flag from flag set #1 is not set on any user accounts).
You can suppress the display of an entire text.dat
line by simply
setting the text to a blank string (“”
)1).
WARNING
Make a backup of the text.dat
file before you edit it. If you damage the file
syntax when editing it, Synchronet may execute erroneously or even fail to
initialize.
See Also
- CTRL Directory