RE: emulaton problem

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, James H H Lampert wrote:

> When the InfoWindow II series of terminals was introduced, it became
> possible to have attributes that don't take up screen positions, and to
> control color independently of highlight, blink, and column seps, but
> these capabilities were never adequately documented or supported. These
> terminals also have a configuration setting to allow column separators to
> be turned off completely, and some can also completely remap the screen
> colors.

Just in case anyone finds 5250 emulators interesting and would like to 
help out with one (hint! hint!):

x5250 also supports all of these features (some are better supported than 
others!).  Currently, x5250 will support screen attributes that don't 
require using any screen positions but lib5250 (which does the actual 
communication with the AS/400) doesn't.  You can see this by starting SDA, 
creating a field with a given attribute, and then entering characters 
immediately next to that field.  While this is really a bug because a real 
terminal would change the attributes of the additional characters, I'm 
content to call it a feature :)  In x5250 each character on the screen has 
an attribute mask with bits for every possible attribute (with room to 
grow).  Thus if the host could send the attributes "blue, column 
separators, blink, underline, reverse image" x5250 could display it.

I hope I'm not abusing midrange-l by talking about x5250 too much.  Anyone 
who wants to pursue this talk to me on the linux5250 list.

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw