Learn to Program with Small Basic

a: 97
b: 98
1: 49
2: 50
Fancy Characters
Let’s explore some characters not used in English. Listing 18-4 shows a
simple program that displays the symbols for 140 Unicode characters, starting
with the character whose code point is 9728. You can change this number
to explore other Unicode symbols.
1 ' UnicodeDemo.sb
2 GraphicsWindow.BrushColor = "Black"
3 GraphicsWindow.FontSize = 30 ' Makes the font larger
4
5 code = 9728 ' Code point for the first symbol
6 xPos = 0 ' Horizontal position for drawing a symbol
7 yPos = 0 ' Vertical position for drawing a symbol
8 For row = 1 To 7 ' Draws 7 rows
9 xPos = 0 ' For each new row, start at the left edge
10 For col = 1 To 20 ' 20 columns for each row
11 ch = Text.GetCharacter(code) ' Gets a character
12 GraphicsWindow.DrawText(xPos, yPos, ch) ' Draws it
13 code = code + 1 ' Sets to next code point
14 xPos = xPos + 30 ' Leaves a horizontal space
15 EndFor
16 yPos = yPos + 30 ' Moves to the next row
17 EndFor
Listing 18-4: Demonstrating Unicode characters
The outer For loop runs seven times (line 8). Each time the outer
loop runs, the inner loop displays 20 symbols that are placed 30 pixels
apart (lines 10–15). After drawing a complete row of symbols, we move
the vertical drawing position down 30 pixels to draw the next row (line 16).
Figure 18-3 shows the output of this program.
Figure 18-3: The output of UnicodeDemo.sb
Advanced Text Magic 271