STRIP

Syntax

STRIP [#ch,] colour

Location

QL ROM

Whenever a character is printed to the QL screen, it is made up of two components - the character itself which appears in the current INK colour, and the rectangular block on which the character has been formed. The latter is known as the ‘strip’ of the character and the size of this strip depends on the current character size and spacing (see CSIZE).

Normally, when you set the PAPER colour of a window, the character STRIP is set to the same colour. However, you may wish to print characters on a different background colour in order to make them stand out. STRIP allows you to alter the colour of the character background in the specified window (default #1) to a given colour (or composite colour). However, if you want to print characters in a window without using this character background (ie. forming a transparent strip), you will need to use the commands OVER 0 or OVER -1 (see OVER for more details).

Example

A simple routine for printing out a Title on screen:

10 WINDOW 512, 256, 0, 0: PAPER 4
20 MODE 4: CLS
30 TITLE #1,'This is a Title', 120, 95
40 :
100 DEFine PROCedure TITLE(ch,text$,x,y)
110   CSIZE 2,1: OVER 0
120   CURSOR #ch,x-2,y+1
130   STRIP #ch,0: PRINT #ch,FILL$(' ',LEN(text$))
140   CURSOR #ch,x,y
150   STRIP #ch,2: INK #ch,7
160   PRINT #ch,text$
170   CURSOR #ch,x-2,y+1
180   OVER 1: INK#ch,0
190   PRINT #ch,text$
200 END DEFine

NOTE

The STRIP colour is automatically reset to the same as the PAPER colour following a PAPER command.

CROSS-REFERENCE

PAPER also sets the STRIP colour. Compare IO_TRAP. CSIZE and CHAR_INC allow you to alter the spacing between characters. INK contains details of standard and composite colours. See also INVERSE which can also prove useful.