FONTDEF illegal function call

So, the FONTDEF command lets you define font characters. But, it only lets you define characters on those that already exist?

FONTDEF 0,"FFFF"*64

results in a lot of white null spaces, as expected, but

FONTDEF 1,"FFFF"*64

returns Illegal function call(FONTDEF). Doing ?CHR$(1) results in one of the undefined x-box character things, so pretty much any undefined character wont let you use FONTDEF on it from what I've found so far. Is this a bug or just another strange design choice?

yeah that's a bug I think. It happens because FONTDEF only works on characters that actually exist, not "invalid" characters which default to the [x] symbol.

yeah that's a bug I think. FONTDEF is kind of annoying (even without bugs), but I guess it's better than including an entire GRP just to change 2 or 3 characters.

I want to make ASCII in the unused codes. That's why this bugs me, the numbering seems so random and I don't want to write my own functions for everything font based :/ Plus I had an idea for text formatting like boldness etc. by creating varied fontdefs by including certain offsets Like CHR$(65) vs CHR$(65+BOLD) kind of idea

yeah you won't be able to do that... there are 65536 characters and under 4096 symbols. 99% of characters use that stupid X symbol, so you can't change them independantly There IS unused space at the bottom of the font GRP, but no character codes map to it. Maybe when 3.3 comes out you could make a custom character encoding with the 8x8 bg tiles. But for now, the harder you think about SB's text system, the more annoying it seems.

Yeah, it's very inconsiderate of people not to all use the same alphabet. Once you start dealing with natural languages - particularly more than one - messiness is inevitable.