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When your GUI application is going to need a large variety of different bitmaps for any kind of GUI control that accepts a bitmap for its icon, you can use font-based bitmaps instead of trying to get different images for each control. Bitmap fonts provide a comprehensive set of glyphs, or icons.
In this article we will use one of the most popular bitmap fonts: FontAwesome. You can download it from: www.fontawesome.com.
However, any bitmap font can be used (Material Design Font, dafont.com, etc)
The .otf file that you download can be located in any folder that you choose. You create a named font with W$CREATEFONT that points to the path (full or relative) of the font.
move "Font Awesome 5 Free Solid" to font-name
call "w$createfont" using "files/Font Awesome 5 Free-Solid-900.otf"
font-name
Then you load a font with W$FONT based on that named font.
initialize wfont-data
set wfdevice-console to true
move font-name to wfont-name
move 10 to wfont-size
call "w$font" using wfont-get-font
h-font
wfont-data
Now, in order to use some of the icons from that font for your program, you need to create a strip of selected icons.
The FontAwesome font uses a hexadecimal code of 4 characters to refer to their icons.
Here's a link to all of the available icons and their hex codes: https://fontawesome.com/v5/cheatsheet
Each of those hex codes need to be converted to a decimal value and then combined in a national variable as in this example:
77 character-1-hex pic x(4).
77 character-1-n pic n(1).
77 character-1-red pic x(2) comp-x
redefines character-1-n.
...
77 icon-characters pic n any length.
...
move "f1c3" to character-1-hex
move "f576" to character-2-hex
move "f008" to character-3-hex
move function hex2dec(character-1-hex) to character-1-red
move function hex2dec(character-2-hex) to character-2-red
move function hex2dec(character-3-hex) to character-3-red
initialize icon-characters
string character-1-n delimited by space
character-2-n delimited by space
character-3-n delimited by space
into icon-characters.
Once you have the list of decimal values in a national string, you can create the bitmap strip in memory, using the W$BITMAP routine:
call "w$bitmap" using wbitmap-load-symbol-font,
h-font
icon-characters
20
icon-color
giving h-font-icon
Now, since the h-font-icon handle of font contains the strip of icons 20 pixels each, you can assign icons from it to a GUI control on the screen section:
03 ef-1
entry-field
line 5
col 15
size 20 cells
lines 2 cells
bitmap-handle h-font-icon
bitmap-width 20
bitmap-number 1
.
03 pb-1
push-button
line 9
col 15
lines 2 cells
size 20 cells
bitmap-handle h-font-icon
bitmap-width 20
title-position 2
title "Option A"
bitmap-number 2
.
This code creates part of a simple example screen that looks like this:
Attached is a zip file with a full sample of using the FontAwesome bitmap font. After downloading it, you can compile:
iscc fontawesome.cbl
and run:
iscrun FONTAWESOME
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How to use font-based icons in isCOBOL GUI programs
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