HP 3000 Manuals

Micro Focus COBOL System Reference, Volume 2

Highlighting 

By default, the behavior of the ACCEPT and DISPLAY operations that use
high intensity attributes is as follows:

   *   Highlighted text appears in high intensity mode for terminals
       supporting a high intensity attribute but no low intensity
       attribute.  This is as specified in terminfo.

   *   Highlighted text appears in normal mode for terminals which
       support low intensity mode, as specified in terminfo, and which
       use this low intensity mode as the default mode for nonhighlighted
       text.

For full details on terminfo see the chapter Device Handling and 
Terminfo.  This COBOL system assumes that low intensity and high
intensity space characters cannot be distinguished from normal space
characters, so the RTS attempts to perform some optimization because of
this.  This is particularly effective on terminals supporting low
intensity mode.

You can change the behavior of the high and low intensity attributes by
setting the COBATTR environment variable.  See the appendix Micro Focus 
Environment Variables for details of the COBATTR environment variable.

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation