All Shapes and Sizes

You can change the font, size, and appearance of the text of a zephyrgram. You can send zephyrgrams with boldface, italic, and different-sized of text. To send part of your message in a large font, you would format it like this:

@large(message)

Only the portion of the message that you enclose in parentheses will be in large text, so you don't have to make the entire message the same size or style of text. You can use any form of bracket to enclose the portion of the message that you want to be affected, including [ ], { }, and ( ). In addition to @large you can use @small or @huge to affect the size of text in your zephyrgrams. To use boldface or italics, you can use @bold (or @b) and @italic (or @i). The formatting for all of these is identical to the example above, replacing @large with the typeface you want to use.

You can also use different fonts in zephyrgrams. The three fonts that are readily available for zephyrgrams are Courier, Times, and Helvetica. Courier is the default font. To use a different font, you can use @fontname(message) in the text of a message. For example, to send the message ``hi!'' in the Helvetica font, you would type @helvetica(hi!) as your message.

You can also send zephyrgrams with color text, using a slightly different formatting technique. To use color, format your message by typing @color(colorname)message. For example, if you wanted the message ``I like blue'' to be printed in blue, you could use @color(blue)I like blue as your message. Unlike fonts, sizes, and typefaces, this will make the rest of the message stay that color, unless you switch it back with another @color in the same message. Another way to have color text limited to a portion of the message is to format it like this:

I like @(@color(purple) purple), but I don't like @(@color(green) green).

If you sent this as your message, the word purple would appear in purple and green would appear in green. The colors available vary by system architecture; a full list can be found in the file /usr/openwin/lib/rgb.txt on machines running Solaris, and in /etc/X11/rgb.txt on linux-athena. Note that some colors will be invisible on some backgrounds, especially on monochrome screens, so you risk sending messages which are unreadable.

You can also combine font changes and size changes into your zsigs by using these same formatting commands when you set the zsig. You should be especially cautious when using colors in your zsig, since, as mentioned above, some colors may be unreadable on certain displays. If you use color formatting without the extra parentheses, your username and message would also be the same possibly invisible color, and other people wouldn't be able to tell who was zwriting them. If you decide to still use color zsigs and risk them being invisible, you should use the format with the additional parentheses, which we will repeat here. You would use something like

@(@color(blue)I like blue zsigs)

and make this your zsig with zctl set zwrite-signature.

It is important to emphasize that color in zsigs can cause legibility problems on monochrome screens or screens that have colorful backgrounds. In general it is best to use special colors and fonts as little as possible, for these reasons, and because it tends to annoy some users.