[Oberon] Global font change on OLR

Sat Apr 2 17:03:18 CEST 2016

Dear Chris,

I am grateful for your quick help.
Following your help, I found System.ChangeFont, which changes the font globally.
Hope you implicitly referred me this.

Dear Members,

Looks like, seeing many more simple/silly questions from me,
all the senior members in this list are irritated/bored of me.
I apologize and beg your pardon.

Here are my feelings.

It is never the case that I don't want to study or trying to learn things of my own.
But sometimes I feel, I miss some points and hence that arises as a doubt.
Also I don't implicitly complain that, good texts on the topic are absent,
or already some members answered to a similar questions  earlier.
But at times, I might have skipped them unintentionally or forgot.

Not sure how members long associated with ETH and Oberon feel,
but to me Oberon is still little difficult.
May be that is due to my long time active acquaintance with Windows/Linux.
I have some knowledge how to use GUI of Windows and CLI of Linux.
But still, Oberon is a little challenge to me, though it has GUI/CLI both.
I have seen people, who don't even know "C" of Computers, navigate and do many magics in Windows.
I don't think I am able to do similarly in Oberon.
In Linux, one simply goes to google and search for a command, reads the man page and done.
I haven't seen such a facility here for Oberon.
Again, these are not my complain against Oberon.
I understand that Oberon is Oberon and not meant to be Windows and Linux.
It has its own beauty and simplicity, but may be not the way common man thinks of.
That is why I am here and still love Oberon, at least for its ability to offer GUI within a fraction of a floppy disk size.

May be, a long time association with Oberon and developing programs within it for years,
has raisen you all to a point, where things are at your finger tips.
But I don't think I have acquired a fraction of such a experience,
in last 4-5 years of my acquaintance with Oberon.
So faults are mine, and I too feel that some times my questions are too simple.

Regarding the books/papers...
It is true that we have everything in literature,
but to get desired information at the desired moment,
one has to master or remember all the stuff from the books/papers.
Again this comes by re-reading and practical experimentation which takes a little time.
At the same time, (I feel) to ease the things a bit more,
and to lessen the the time to get the desired information,
we have forums/groups, where we get a friend circle where we can ask questions
and get answers from friends in a minute which takes at least 5 minutes to get it from book.
I feel, this is (though not whole, at least one of) the idea behind forums/groups.
So sometimes I feel to ask in forums, even though I have a simple question,
rather than having an ego of self-taught-professor
(who likes finding answer of his own, spending days, but not asking others
for the fear of loosing self esteem).
Again, sincerely, these are not my excuses for asking silly questions, but the way I see it.
In case our forum doesn't believe in this, it is again my fault and excuse me.

Here I present the flow of my thoughts, to show how my recent doubt arised.
This is never to express that "so, I was right to ask such a doubt",
but rather to express the fact that "here is how I fall into trap and so asked for help".
I would like to not to cite exact page number or section number of a book/paper here,
for that may create a feeling that, thought I deny explicitly,
implicitly I like to express my ego in lines of "so, I was right to ask such a doubt".

I wanted to change the font size globally so that it would be easy to read the code inside Oberon.
I vividly remember that there is somewhere I had read about changing font.
So a command for changing font must be there somewhere explicitly with such a name.
I went on to Tools in a hope that all available commands of Oberon are available in some Tools.
[Not sure by thinking so I am right or wrong.]
I found one in System Tool, Script.ChangeFont.
Immediately I clicked it! To be frank, I didn't even care to check, what this does.
To my luck, nothing happened. :-(
Observing the command name, I thought this command may be for changing the font of System.Text which I opened using Script.Open.
Anyway, when nothing happened, I was not worried.
Because if it would have worked also, (I thought,) it would only change the font of the Script opened.
But I need to change the font of Oberon itself.
So I proceed to look for some other Changefont command somewhere else.
One more I found in Edit Tool; Edit.ChangeFont and System.SetFont.
Name says System.SetFont is the one I am looking for.
Immediately I clicked it! Again Nothing happened. :-(
Good. Time to think little more. Why it doesn't work?
I remember, somewhere I read, Oberon prefers to present machine states visible than to keep things hidden.
Here I am dealing with fonts; this is a visible stuff. But why nothing is visible?
Why then Oberon announces so...if nothing is visible, neither the action taken nor the error made!
Now time to open the books... after failed for twice or thrice.
I opened my books. Found that, it says, click the command, after that if you type anything anywhere, it will be with a bigger font! Good.
Is it that why I am not seeing anything?
Being curious, I typed something in System.Log. Wow, big fonts appeared!
But I am not happy this time even.
I wanted to see each character on my display of Oberon screen to be bigger.
So now, how to do that?
I didn't find any more clue from my head. :-(
Being hopeless, I thought, it would be better to ask rather than more trial and error!

Sorry for a long mail.
If at least one member cares to read this so far, I shall be happy.
If he extends his helping hand, I shall be grateful.

With thanks and best regards,

Yours sincerely,
Srinivas Nayak

Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/

On 04/02/2016 04:54 PM, Chris Burrows wrote:
> Dear Srinivas,
>
> I recommend you do yourself a favour and follow the advice that Bob Walkden
> gave you a couple of days ago: read Martin Reiser's book "The Oberon System
> - User Guide and Programmers Manual". I can't imagine how many hours Reiser
> must have spent working on that book to help people like yourself to use the
> system. You cannot hope to do anything except scratch the surface unless you
> study it (not just speed-read it) from end to end as there are a significant
> number of novel concepts that you wouldn't even dream of asking questions
> about.
>
> However, if you prefer to learn by experimentation, trial and error you can
> still get good use out of the book as a reference. It has a good Table of
> Contents and an Index that you can use for that purpose.
>
> Regards,
> Chris Burrows
>
> CFB Software
> http://www.astrobe.com
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
>> Srinivas Nayak
>> Sent: Saturday, 2 April 2016 8:48 PM
>> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
>> Subject: [Oberon] Global font change on OLR
>>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I found OLR easier to use while I am on Linux.
>> I think the font size of OLR Oberon is small.
>> How can I change the font size to a bigger one?
>>
>>
>> With thanks and best regards,
>>
>> Yours sincerely,
>> Srinivas Nayak
>>
>> Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/
>> Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/
>> --
>> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related
>> systems https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
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>