Brain Imaging & Analysis Center

'Font' can be used as a stimulus event to change the active text font in a real-time stimulus list. The syntax for FONT events is:

 font          stim_id   stim_flg     start_time   fontnum

The FONTNUM argument indicates which font set you want to use. CIGAL uses the font manager software provided by the Windows Operating System. This software creates a table of the currently available default fonts specified by the video board of the computer. These system fonts are referred to as “hard” fonts, they may vary somewhat between computers depending on the capabilities of the video board hardware. Hard fonts are always available and can be selected by number. To see a display of the fonts available on your computer, use the CIGAL command:

 showfonts

If you see a font you like, for example font 46, you could select that font in your real-time paradigm by inserting the FONT event:

 font             0       0       0          46

which would set text font 46 at time 0.

In addition to the system hard fonts, Windows also supports many “soft” fonts. To load a soft font, you can use the CIGAL FONT command (which is different than the “font” real-time stimulus event). You can use FONT interactively (with no arguments), in which case it will display the font browser dialog. Alternatively, if you know what font you want, you can specify the font by name and size as explicit arguments to the FONT command (e.g. font arial 36, or font “courier new” 12).

When you load a “soft” font it is assigned font number 0. Once loaded, you can select the soft font as “font 0” just the same way you could select any of the hard fonts by their font number.

Note: Soft fonts are displayed using Windows text rendering routines, which can be quite slow. If you use a soft font in a real-time stimulus program and find that your timing is slower than expected, it is probably because the text is being drawn slowly. If possible, find a hard font that suits your purpose and use it. The hard fonts are displayed much faster.

See Also:
Paradigm parameter file, Stimulus table, FONT

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