Blinking Text

[Jor'Mox]

Is there any way to make Mudlet display blinking text (the kind sent by the server, not just making some random bit of text blink, which I could do if I cared to)?

[SlySven]

Not currently! - I did play around with with adding support for over-line, strike-through (mid-line), reverse and slow/fast blinking ( < & > 150 per minute) SGR (set graphic rendition) ESC codes from a putative MUD server and via lua formatting commands akin to the existing ones for bold/underline/italics. As far as I could see, Qt itself offers support for all the visual formatting directly APART from flashing and I was able (after fixing up the HTML exporter) to get them all to show up in a copied to web-page in a browser. To get reliably blinking text though I had to embed a bit of javascript as although <blink>...</blink> is in some browsers they were never W3 approved HTML tags - and they have been ranked as being about as welcome in HTML as "goto" is in 'C' code!

I'm not sure, though, how much processing power we want to use to continuously redraw what is on-screen, and personally, how to arrange it so that the drawing is always after exactly the same interval despite what other variety of tasks are being done both within the Mudlet application and Operating System wide. I'd suppose it would be preferred that (foreground) text is flashing, i.e. is drawn alternately in it's foreground and then the background colour but with a background that does not change - rather than repeatedly swapping the two over the area that is marked as being flashing text. The latter is simpler to do IIRC but is not so visually attractive.

[Jor'Mox]

Well, I think that exact timing is probably not all that crucial, whereas accommodating blinking text, which is often used to signify particularly important things in certain MUDs, seems like it would be a worthwhile thing to do. Just my two cents.

[Belgarath]

I second Jor'Mox two cents with a quarter of my own!