Welcome to the wonderful world of Phontz!

First I would like to thank you for using my program.  It makes writing it all the more worthwhile to me.

First off, though, I would like to say that this program is provided AS IS with no gurantees.  While there is no problems or harmful bugs in the program (that I know of), sometimes things do happen without rhyme or reason.  I will say that I tested this program extensively on my machine (a pentium 150 w/48 megs of ram) with no negative results.  Now that that is out of the way, lets continue.

Please note that in order to run this program to run as intended, you will need to install the Visual Basic 5 Runtime files.  These can be downloaded from CNet.com or Microsoft.com or from my website at http://welcome.to/chrishowell


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*           TO INSTALL         *
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Unzip the contents of the zip file to a temporary directory.  Run the setup.exe program from the temporary directory and follow the on-screen instructions.  After the program has been installed, you can delete the temporary file.  To uninstall the program, select Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel.


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*    Distribution of Phontz       *
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Phontz is provided at the affordable price of FREE!!!  Ok, free really isn't a price, but Phontz is free.  Thats right, you can use this program, my sweat, my blood, and my tears (well maybe not the first two) at absolutely no cost to yourself.  And, not only is Phontz free to use, it is also free to redistribute.  However, there are a few catches to that last one.  The following must be done if you choose to redistribute Phontz:

1. Phontz may NOT be sold for a profit.  You may charge a reasonable amount to compensate for the medium on which you are redistributing it such as a disk or cd-r, as long as you are redistributing it on a physical medium.  You may NOT charge even a penny if you redistribute it through electronic means such as email or providing it as a download, or any other means in which you redistribute it at no cost to yourself.

2. All the files associated with Phontz must be redistributed with the Phontz program.  This includes any and all image files, help files, et all.  This especially pretains to the text you are reading right now; You MUST include a copy of THE ORIGINAL README.txt file, intact and unaltered.

3. If you wish to include Phontz in a "shareware collection", or some variant thereof, you must notify me that you are doing so.

IN ADDITION, you may not decompile, disassemble, or in any way reverse engineer Phontz.  If you do this, I'm gonna have to send Bruno after you.  And you know you don't want Bruno after you...

As I said, the program is free and I expect no monetary reimbursement.  However, it would be appreciated if you could lend any feedback on the program so that I can enhance future versions of the program.


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*       About Phontz        *
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Phontz was developed by myself, Christopher Howell, during 1998 (version 1.0) and continuing into 1999 (version 2.0).  The program was written using Visual Basic 5 Professional Edition with Service Pack 3 installed.  The program makes use of several of the Active X components that come with VB5 including, but not limited to, the RichText Box control, and the CommonDialog control.  Further credits are located at the end of this file.


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*       Why Phontz?        *
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Why the hell would I want to use Phontz?  Why did this kid bother wasting his valuable college consumed time writing this program?  Well, if for no other reason, I love to program.  More importantly, Phontz lets you find the letter that represents that cool symbol font letter you are looking for, like the skull in wingdings.  You could search, by typing all the letters out one at a time, until you found it some years later.  But, with Phontz, all you do is select the font you need to find the symbol in from the drop down box, and BAM, there they all are.  Heck, you might even find a cool symbol letter that you didn't know was there!


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*      Phontz Featurz      *
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 1. Drop down list to choose font

 2. Show all feature to show all characters

 3. Sentence viewer to see how sentences look in other fonts

 4. Document converter to convert text files to another font

 5. "Intellimize" (see below for more info)


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*    What is Intellimize?   *
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Intellimize is a feature (and name) I came up with.  To sum it up: Intellimize is the Windows equivalent of "minimizing" a window on a Macintosh.  Intellimize will shrink the form to show just the control bar of the window.  To intellimize Phontz, select Intellimize from the view window, or press ctrl+I (the shortcut).  To "restore" the form to its original size, press ctrl+I again or press the Enter key (while Phontz is the active window).  I plan to incorporate this feature into all of my future programs.  If you see anyone else using this feature or the name Intellimize, please contact me so that I can determine which party had the feature/name first.  If you like or don't like this feature, please let me know.


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*    Special Phontz Thankz     *
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To:
Microsoft, for creating the easiest, most powerful, limitless developement environment: Visual Basic.


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*       Additional Facts      *
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The Millenium Falcon is the ship that made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.


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*      To Contact     *
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Chris Howell's E-Home: http://welcome.to/chrishowell
                   or: http://members.xoom.com/c_howell

Email: c_howell@xoommail.com


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