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All Shapes and Sizes

@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 Zephyr messages. 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 your whole 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: @(@color(blue) I like blue), but not enough to send completely blue messages. If you sent this as your message, the first three words of the message would be blue. The colors available are listed in the file /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt. Note that some colors will be invisible on some backgrounds, especially on monochrome screens, so you risk sending unreadable messages to people.

You can also combine font changes and size changes into your zsigs by using this same formatting when you set the zsig. You should be especially aware of using colors in your zsig, since, as mentioned above, color may be unreadable on certain displays. Therefore, if you use the 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. Although this will make at least your username and message visible to users, you might still want to think twice about adding large size text and color to zsigs, as it tends to irritate other users.