Common text controls: Preset Characters group
This section lets you automatically limit the characters that are generated. Preset Characters gives you quick and easy access to the most requested types of characters.
What are common controls? Many of the Text plug-ins share parameters that behave the same. To avoid having to repeat these definitions, we cover them once here. If a parameter has special attributes in a plug-in, it will be further explained on that plug-in's manual page.
Character Limits pop-up
This pop-up sets whether you choose letter characters or non-letter characters. The characters are affected by the Only checkboxes. If custom text was entered in the Option Box, that text will override the Character Limits setting.
In Text Grid, left to right, Character Limits using Characters and Symbols.
Lower Character Limit, Upper Character Limit
Customizes the range of characters that are used when random characters are generated. These values set the range of the characters, in decimal ASCII code, that the random characters will be selected from. This limit lets you select an exact range of characters.
Many fonts have symbols in the ASCII slots above 127, the ‘upper’ ASCII range. You can use the Lower and Upper Limits to access these symbols. For example, set Lower to 48 and Upper to 57 to result in only numbers being produced in the streams. Set Lower to 65 and Upper to 90 to result in only capital letters being shown.
TIP: Use Lower and Upper Limits to take advantage of the ‘clip art’ or dingbat fonts that are pictures instead of characters. You might wish to only use a few of the available images – do this, of course, by specifying their ASCII position. It opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.
For more about ASCII and what it means to you (and our plug-ins), go to the ASCII chart at the bottom of this page. There is a complete table for a basic ASCII typeface. This will give you a sample of what most fonts look like in ASCII and the unusual icons you can find in the upper reaches.
At left, a symbol font for Chinese characters.
At right, Lower Limit at 48 and Upper Limit at 57. The result is only numbers 0 through 9.
Only checkboxes
These checkboxes limit the ASCII characters that are used.
Left to right, Binary Only and Numbers Only in Text Grid.
Using monospaced fonts
'Monospaced' means each letter takes up the same amount of space. A seven letter word in a non-monospaced font will take up varying amounts of spaced based on the letters that are in the word. With a monospaced font, a seven letter word always takes up the same amount of space, no matter what letters are used.
Most fonts are NOT monospaced. If you look at an ‘i’ and an ‘o’ in most fonts, the ‘o’ takes up much more space. The ‘i’ of a regular font takes up far less space than a ‘d’. In a monospaced font, however, the ‘i’ takes up just as much space as a capital ‘W’. Monospaced fonts animate very well for some of the text filters, like Text Hacker.
Fonts with normal spacing will cause lines to vary in length slightly. This is because most fonts have certain letters that are closer together than other ones. If you use a monospaced font in which all the spacing between letters is exactly the same, all lines with the same number of characters will be exactly the same length. You can see this effect by comparing a regular font like Times New Roman to mono-spaced fonts like Monaco and OCR-A.
Left to right, a monospaced font and regular font have different character spacing.
Left to right, a monospaced font and regular font have different line spacing.
ASCII Codes
'ASCII' stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. These are the codes that computers use to tell one character from another. Here are the main points: