Editing Remote Imaging Protocol (section)

==Description==
RIPscrip is a simple [[page description language]] similar in concept to [[PostScript]] or [[HPGL]]. Graphics output is described in a series of text instructions, which have been heavily optimized in RIPscrip to be as short as possible in order to save transmission time.:<ref>This section is adapted from the RIPscrip 1.54 documentation, found [http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/ here]</ref>

A RIPscrip aware terminal watches for lines beginning with a special RIPscrip [[escape character]] and interprets the following instructions, passing along non-escaped lines to the text output screen. RIPscrip used separate text and graphics displays, one each, and although it could draw text into the graphics screen, the speed of doing so was such that it was not useful for general text output or editing. Generally, a system using RIPscrip would use the graphics screen for presenting menus, with conventional editing and input taking place in the text screen. RIPscrip would not normally be used to build a conventional [[Graphical user interface|GUI]] with multiple windows or mouse-driven text editing, for instance.

The RIPscrip escape character was the exclamation mark, <code>!</code>. RIPscrip commands were always preceded by the vertical bar, <code>|</code>, followed by a single-letter command. Later versions optionally inserted digits between the vertical bar and command letter, indicating what version of RIPscrip was needed to interpret that command, allowing older terminals to quickly filter out non-supported features. A common command one would find in a RIPscrip file would be to set the size and position of the text output window, typically something like <code>!|w00001B0M10</code>, with the "w" command for "window", followed by a series of numbers indicating its location and size.

RIPscrip commands could be stacked together on a single line for compactness. For instance, <code>!|v00001B0M10|E|c02|Thello world</code> sets up the standard graphics viewport output window with <code>v</code>, erases any existing image with <code>E</code> (redundant as the window was just reset), sets the color to green with <code>c</code>, and then draws text with <code>T</code>. More complex drawings would normally be built out of a series of stacked commands, each one representing some part of the overall drawing to be created, breaking it into logical groups.

In addition to basic graphics like lines and circles, RIPscrip also included commands for interactive objects, notably buttons. The <code>U</code> command drew a button into the display at a specified location with and optional icon, hot key, and label. When the button was pressed with the mouse or hot key, the last parameter, the ''host command'' string, was sent back to the server. In this way the RIPscrip author could produce graphical menus for commands in the system, perhaps one that lists all the available forums by sending the text "FPA" for "forums, public, all". These strings would be different for every host software, and also tend to be somewhat different from system to system.