Hot For HotKeys

HOT
For HotKeys!

A Toaster CG Tutorial by Paul Lara, VDO Productions

Equipment needed: Toaster/Flyer CG 4.0, Ed (or some other suitable text editor)

Kill The Mouse!

have to confess, that I've been using the keyboard for a looong time (don't ask how long). The keyboard is my friend. As a matter of fact, I was using the keyboard well before the mouse showed its plastic tail. I believe the first keyboard I used was attached to a manual Smith-Corona typewriter. The kind where the keys would have to be pushed down to your knees before the letter would come up and smack your paper with that definitive WHAK! I'm glad keyboards aren't that way anymore, since it speeds up my output. Then came WordPerfect: a hotkey for nearly everything you could think of; and you could program macros for those they didn't dream up yet!

That's what makes me so hot for hotkeys. . .speed. NewTek had the right idea when they released their CG program with Toaster version 2.0, because they had (logically, I thought) decided "Since you're in a Character Generation Program, why not have everything available to you via the keyboard?

Logical. Straightforward.

Maybe too logical. They decided to re-introduce heavy mousiness with CG 4.0. Big mistake.

The one thing they did do that saved the day, however, was to provide Arexx hooks to the CG. That's where we'll get the versatility for today's lesson that we've needed.

AttribScripts

Isn't it amazing how, with a PSFonts directory chock-full of cool font faces, there are always the trusty one or two that you end up using for the majority of projects? The same can be said for the color attributes that can be used on-screen with those fonts.

While you can have RED, GREEN, or even TEAL fonts for use on-screen, it seems that the two trustiest colors to stick with are Yellow and White.

Now, let's get to some serious time-savin' here!

There are a couple of font attributes available to us, but they're not quite right. Let's not only improve them, but also make them easily available any time we need them. So the first thing we need to do is to make a professional font face that, like the dark suit, is suitable nearly any time. Let's start with a good, White font:

Enter Toaster CG (NewTek left the F9 hotkey available to us for that; F9 once loads CG, and twice enters CG). Now, let's change to the framestore page type (so we can have some color behind our text instead of the keyable black).

Type out anything (maybe WaveRider Rules) so we can set some attributions to the text.

Select the characters, then go to the Palette button above (yeah, I guess go ahead an use your mouse...for now)

Set the text face color to pure white: 255,255,255

Text shadow should be black: 0,0,0 with the Alpha slider set to about 100.

Set the text border to black: 0,0,0 with the Alpha completely opaque: 255.

Return to the main menu

Tighten it Up

Now, from the main menu bar, we'll choose a cast shadow, with an upper-left light source, set the shadow depth to its shallowest setting, and the Font border to its thinnest setting.
The Outline Position should be set to Text Face Only.

Hotkey Time!

Ok, now we go into the realms of speed with Hotkeys. If you'll render out your text, you'll see it looks pretty clean, yes? Good.

Let's save it and not have to worry about mousing around in the palette anymore for this basic setting:

Go to CG's Rexx Directory by pressing Alt-F1 and then double-click on the file SaveAttrib.Rexx.

Let's name this something catchy, like, well . . . White.rexx. That should be memorable enough.

We now have this attribute available anytime we need it, by pressing Alt-F1, then going into the AttribScripts folder, and then scrolling down to the White.rexx file at the bottom, and then. . .

Man! there has got to be a faster way to get to this file!

A Faster Way!

There is a handy file that allows us to set any other file just a keystroke away in CG.

You can find the CG-Config file in the NewTek/Programs/CG_Support/ folder. Open this file in Ed or any text editor, and notice that there is a long list of assignments such as:

#Macros
REXX:CG/RexxLauncher.Rexx . . .#Alt-F1
REXX:CG/SaveTextFile.Rexx . . .#Alt-F2
REXX:CG/SaveState.rexx . . .#Alt-F3

Well, we don't want to mess with Alt-F1, since that is the key to the Golden ARexx door. I have found little daily use for save text file and Save state. they are also positioned on the Keyboard so as to be easy to remember, so:

While you're in Ed, replace the filename SaveTextfile.Rexx with our newly-created White.rexx and we're in business!

Show Time

ave CG-Config with our changes, and now, anytime you want to assign a clean, white face to your text, merely press Alt-F2.

You may want to look over the list of hotkey assignments provided in the default file, and substitute many of them with macros of your choosing. (I don't know about you, but I personally don't ponder too many Haikus while in CG)

It's also a good idea to go ahead and print out a copy of the default hotkeys, so you can learn the ones you want to use.

...So there we have it. Hotkeys for every occasion. Learn them, and you'll be keeping your keyboard HOT while your mouse gets to cool its tail a while.