READER COMMENT

GEMKIT revision

A simple improvement, a suggestion and a clarification for my program GEMKIT may interest your readers. I say in the article that one of the subroutines creates dialog boxes. They are alert boxes, which are more limited in what they can accomplish than a true dialog box.

Also, any time that special text faces and styles have been used, and you want to return to the default text face, you should use two GOSUB calls: GOSUB NORMAL and GOSUB BLANKOUT. Without the BLANKOUT call, you get some weird stuff.

Finally, before leaving the program, I advised programmers to use GOSUB GET.OUT. Here's a new version that resets all the changes that GEMKIT can create. Without the changes, line widths, type styles and such can survive to confound programs that don't use GEMKIT. Here's the new subroutine:

GET.OUT:title$ = "OUTPUT":gosub newtitle:gosub normal:gosub arrow:gosub rtype:gosub blankout:leftend = 0:rightend = 0:gosub endstyle:linew = l:gosub linewidth:RETURN

—Gordon Billingsley
Murphysboro, IL

Thanks for the update, Gordon. However, we might mention that although an alert box is more limited than a "true" dialog box, it is nonetheless a dialog box. It is simply a predefined type of dialog box that the creators of GEM included for the convenience of programmers.