OnDrawCell Font Viewer

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The other day,  I needed to find the divide (÷) and multiply (×) symbols for use in an arithmetic drill program.    They are part of most standard fonts, but where?  

I wrote this FontViewer program in an hour or two and found them. ( ÷ has decimal value 247, hexadecimal F7,  and × has value  215, hex D7).    Since the program uses the OnDrawCell event exit in TStringGrid, I decided it would make a good Delphi-Techniques item.  

Hexadecimal Primer

We need 16 symbols to represent hexadecimal, or base16 numbers,  the same way we need 10 symbols for decimal numbers.   "Hexadecimal"  is commonly shortened to "hex".  In hex, we use 0-9 and  A-F to represent the decimal numbers  0-15.   In decimal, each position to the left  represents next higher power of 10; in hexadecimal positions to the left represent higher powers of 16. 

 So instead of the 100's, 10's, 1's columns, we have the 256's, 16's, 1's columns. For example:
'10' in decimal represents one 10 and zero 1's. ('0A' in hex) 
'10' in hex represents one 16 and zero 1's. ('16' in decimal) 
'FF' in hex represents 15 16's plus 15 1's (or '255' in decimal).   

Characters in  fonts are 1 byte, 8 bits, in length.  Since each bit is a binary digit, 8 bits can represent 28, or 256 different symbols with values between 0 and 255.  .  This program displays all 256 possible symbols from a font selected using the TFontDialog component.  

 The display is a 17*17 stringgrid, with row 0 and column 0 used for labeling the rows and columns.   If we "name" the characters with their hexadecimal value  we get  convenient 2 digit identifiers ranging from 00 to FF.   The units position  of this identifier is used to label the columns and the leftmost (16's) position to name the rows.   So, for example,  the space character has decimal value 32,  hex 20,  and appears in our grid in the row labeled 2 and and column labeled 0.   

Most of the work is done by the DrawCell procedure.   Borders cells use the InttoHex function to convert row or column numbers to hexadecimal characters, interior cells assign the Fontdialog1 font to the Stringgrid1's canvas,  then calculates the numeric value of the character to be displayed as 16*(row-1)+column-1.  (The -1's are necessary since row and column zero are used for labels, forcing character 00 to display in row, 1, column 1. )

There's an AdjustGrid procedure here which adjusts the grid size to just enclose the column widths and borders.  Seems like TStringGrid should have an Autosize property to handle this,. but  I haven't been able to find one.     

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Further Explorations

I thought about increasing grid size to allow for display of larger font sizes, but decided it wasn't worth it.  So character  displays may get clipped for large font sizes.   

Modified: May 15, 2018

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