Hi guys, need some advice here. I need to display some text on the screen (code actually).
However I need to add support for zooming. For example, I want to be able to zoom in on a particular area, and similarly to zoom out so that I can see all/most of the code at once.

The code will be colour-coded (hmmm) so let's say that some lines will be black and others, red.

One method I was thinking of was when zooming out, simply draw a line on the screen representing a line of code (either black or red). Then by clicking on it I can zoom in. Would this work? Can you all give me a better/alternative approach?

render the code to large bitmap, then scale the bitmap to the appropriate size and draw. i have no X11 programming experience but i could knock up a win32 example if it would help.

Not sure if you misunderstood me (or maybe I misunderstood you), it is text that I want to zoom, not a picture.

I suppose you'd need to find a way to display text in a different size; I have no idea how you could do that without using graphics Usually the console font is fixed according to the VGA mode you're running in; fonts in a terminal window cannot, as far as I know, be manipulated by a programming running in the terminal window.

You could do it with ASCII art, I guess

ZOOM

i assumned you wanted to do this in X, so as i said all you would need to do was render the text to a bitmap then scale appropriatly and draw. but if your trying to do it in a console then ive no idea how to do it, as wapcaplet said i dont think its possible without using graphics.

just had an idea for doing it on console - do as i say above render the text to a bitmap, scale it, then draw it with aalib. results wont look amazing but i think theyed be pretty good.