Text Formatting

The MSN Chat Control sends a "Style" CTCP rather than a normal IRC Message.

\x01S <color><style><font>;<character set> <message>\x01

Colors

The MSN Chat Control supports 16 text colors, which are identical to the colors found in the CSS Level 1 specification. If the text color specified matches the background color (usual white), the default text color (usually black) is shown.

The MSN Chat Control allows 127 colors (1 - 127) to be specified as a single byte, with each number mapping to one of the 16 text colors shown in the table below. The mapping of colors above 16 uses an unusual algorithm that does not include aqua.

if (value != 16) { value = value % 15; }
if (value = 0) { value = 15 }

MSN Chat Colors

Name	Value	HTML Color Code	Example
black	1	#000000	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
white	2	#ffffff	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
maroon	3	#800000	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
green	4	#008000	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
navy	5	#000080	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
olive	6	#808000	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
purple	7	#800080	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
teal	8	#008080	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
silver	9	#c0c0c0	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
gray	10	#808080	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
red	11	#ff0000	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
lime	12	#00ff00	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
blue	13	#0000ff	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
yellow	14	#ffff00	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
fuchsia	15	#ff00ff	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
aqua	16	#00ffff	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Styles

The MSN Chat Control supports bold, italic, and underlined text, although it does not support sending underlined text. To avoid text being unreadable, if the text color specified matches the background color (usual white), the default text color (usually black) is shown instead.

The MSN Chat Control allows 127 styles (1 - 127) to be specified as a single byte bitmask, with numbers outside of that range possibly overwriting existing color information. The bitmask value is increased by one to avoid NUL being sent to/from the server.

enum enumChatFormat {
  chfNone =      0x0,
  chfBold =      0x1,
  chfItalic =    0x2,
  chfUnderline = 0x4,
}

If we wanted to make our text Bold (1), Italic (2) and Underlined (4), we would send the sum of those numbers, plus one (8) as a byte.

MSN Chat Character Sets

Value	Description	Preview
1	None	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
2	Bold	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
3	Italic	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
4	Bold & Italic	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
5	Underline	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
6	Bold & Underline	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
7	Italic & Underline	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
8	Bold, Italic & Underline	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Font

Any font on the client's computer can be used to style text by specifying the font name as a string. As there is no sharing of fonts, if the recipient does not have the specified font installed, a default font such as Tahoma may be used.

Character Sets

The MSN Chat Control supports various character sets. The default character set is Ansi (0). It's recommended that any new clients send messages with the Oem (255) character set, which supports Unicode.

MSN Chat Character Sets

Name	Value	Description
Baltic	186	Baltic character set.
Mac	77	Characters used by Macintosh.
Russian	204	Russian character set.
EastEurope	238	Eastern European character set.
Thai	222	Thai character set.
Vietnamese	163	Vietnamese character set.
Turkish	162	Turkish character set.
Greek	161	Greek character set.
Arabic	178	Arabic character set.
Hebrew	177	Hebrew character set.
Johab	130	Korean character set.
Oem	255	Extended ASCII character set used with disk operating system (DOS) and some Microsoft Windows fonts.
ChineseBig5	136	Chinese character set used mostly in Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan.
GB2312	134	Chinese character set used in mainland China.
Hangul	129	Korean character set.
Hangeul	129	Another common spelling of the Korean character set.
ShiftJIS	128	Japanese character set.
Symbol	2	Symbol character set.
Default	1	System default character set.
Ansi	0	ASCII character set.