i'll answer the first one
I don't believe you can. However there is some good news
the text commands in dbpro are horrendously slow, seriously they will drag performance down so much its almost unbelievable. So we aren't losing much by getting rid of it
What you need is either d3dfunc or a2text, I found a2text suits my needs better as I don't need to initialise it all the time. Both of these work in that they actually create a whole bunch of sprites for each character in a font
Then what you do is...
dim Verdana(48) as integer
for i=2 to array count(verdana(0)) step 2
Verdana(i)=a2CreateFont("verdana",i,a2Size_Char(),a2Style_Bold())
Next i
this will create all the necessary character's into sprites, stored in an integer variable, the above code only creates all font sizes in steps of 2 up to 48 in the BOLD format. If you want more formats or styles create more variables, or simply modify the above
When you want to print text out you have a slightly different syntax
instead of
ink rgb(255,255,255),0
text 50,100,"testing"
which imo is a massive pain in the ass always having to set 'ink' if you use different coloured text (it's also very slow)
you write
a2text Verdana(12),50,100,"testing",rgb(255,255,255)
the first benefit is the removal of the ink command, now text can be set on an individual line by line basis without having to worry about resetting it. This also applies to the styling and size of the font, it's on a per line basis, not globally set
So the above code will print out "testing" in the verdana bold style at 12pt font. If you wanted a larger pt size, say 18, put in Verdana(18)
Simple enough?
The replacement for 'center text' is
a2boxtext Verdana(20),0,0,Screen width(),screen height(),"Print to center of screen",1,1,0,rgb(255,0,255)
