Setting Colors and Fonts
Colors and fonts are common attributes of all Wave Widgets. Keywords are provided for setting these attributes.
Setting Colors
Many Wave Widgets provide keywords for setting colors. The keywords include: Basecolor, Background, and Foreground.
Basecolor—The color of the “container” or “box” for the following widgets: ButtonBox, RadioBox, ToolBox, and ControlsBox.
Background—The color of a button.
Foreground—The color of the text on a button.
Figure 5-29: Color Keywords illustrates the use of each color keyword.
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The color keywords have the form:
Keyword = 'colorname'
where colorname is the name of an X library color. For example:
Background = 'Skyblue'
Color names are commonly found in the following files on most systems:
(UNIX) /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt
(WIN) <maindir>\wave\lib\std\windows\rgb.txt
where <maindir> is the main PV‑WAVE directory.
note | For Windows, this file is a reference file only. Any modifications made to this file will not affect the colors used by PV‑WAVE. |
If you cannot find these color files on your system, see your System Administrator.
Predefined Colors for Windows Systems
In addition to the colors listed in the rgb.txt file, you may use any of the predefined Windows system colors listed in Table 5-2: Predefined WIndows System Colors as your widget colors.
Windows System Colors | Corresponding Widget Color |
|---|---|
COLOR_3DDKSHADOW | Dark shadow for 3D display elements. |
COLOR_3DFACE, COLOR_BTNFACE | Face color for 3D display elements. |
COLOR_3DHILIGHT, COLOR_3DHIGHLIGHT, COLOR_BTNHILIGHT, COLOR_BTNHIGHLIGHT | Highlight color for 3D display elements (for edges facing the light source). |
COLOR_3DLIGHT | Light color for 3D display elements (for edges facing the light source). |
COLOR_3DSHADOW, COLOR_BTNSHADOW | Shadow color for 3D display elements (for edges facing away from the light source). |
COLOR_ACTIVEBORDER | Active window border. |
COLOR_ACTIVECAPTION | Active window caption. |
COLOR_APPWORKSPACE | Background color of multiple document interface (MDI) applications. |
COLOR_BACKGROUND, COLOR_DESKTOP | Desktop. |
COLOR_BTNTEXT | Text on push buttons. |
COLOR_CAPTIONTEXT | Text in caption, size box, and scroll bar arrow box. |
COLOR_GRAYTEXT | Grayed (disabled) text. This color is set to 0 if the current display driver does not support a solid gray color. |
COLOR_HIGHLIGHT | Items selected in a control. |
COLOR_HIGHLIGHTTEXT | Text of selected items in a control. |
COLOR_INACTIVEBORDER | Inactive window border. |
COLOR_INACTIVECAPTION | Inactive window caption. |
COLOR_INFOBK | Color of text in an inactive caption. |
COLOR_INFOTEXT | Text color for tool tip controls. |
COLOR_MENU | Menu background. |
COLOR_MENUTEXT | Text in menus. |
COLOR_SCROLLBAR | Scroll bar gray area. |
COLOR_WINDOW | Window background. |
COLOR_WINDOWFRAME | Window frame. |
COLOR_WINDOWTEXT | Text in windows. |
Specifying XtDefaultForeground or XtDefaultBackground causes the widget to use the appropriate Windows system colors.
Setting Fonts on UNIX
The Font keyword is used to set the font used to create text in a widget. The Font keyword has the form:
Font = 'fontname'
where fontname is the name of a font available on your system. On UNIX, for example, Font may be specified as follows:
Font = '-b&h-lucida-bold-r-normal-sans-14-*'note | Use the command xlsfonts to obtain a list of fonts available on your X server. |
If you inadvertently specify a font that cannot be found by the X server, a different font will be substituted.
Setting Fonts on Windows
On Windows, use the MSFont keyword to specify fonts for use in Wave Widgets. The MSFont keyword is specified as a string of the following form:
'face_name, point size, attribute'
where face_name specifies the type face, and attribute specifies font attributes such as bold, italic, underline, etc.
For example: MSFont = 'Arial, 8, bold'
You can also specify Windows system fonts as shown in Table 5-3: Window System Fonts.
Windows System Fonts | Corresponding Widget Fonts |
|---|---|
ANSI_FIXED | Windows fixed-pitch (monospace) system font. |
ANSI_VAR | Windows variable-pitch (proportional space) system font. |
DEFAULT_GUI | Default font for user interface objects such as menus and dialog boxes. |
DEVICE_DEFAULT | The standard font for the current graphics device. |
OEM_FIXED | Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) dependent fixed-pitch (monospace) font. |
SYSTEM | The standard Windows variable-width system font. |
SYSTEM_FIXED | The standard, fixed-width Windows system font. |
If the font you specify isn’t supported on your system, Windows substitutes another font, which is usually the system font.
Using a Resource File to Set Colors and Fonts
Characteristics such as foreground color, background color, and font are known as resources, and these characteristics can be initialized using a resource file. Wave Widgets provides the ability to specify these resources with the keywords Foreground, Background, Basecolor, and Font, as discussed in the previous two sections.
When the Resource File is Checked
If widget resources are not specified with the keywords Foreground, Background, Basecolor, and Font, PV-WAVE will query the X resource database and use the values defined there.
note | Using a resource file for Wave Widgets is optional. |
Adding resources to the resource database is a two step process.
The first step is to create a resource file. The following is a sample resource file for setting application-wide resources for foreground color, background color, and font of a Wave Widgets application called my_gui:my_gui*foreground: Black
my_gui*background: Cyan
my_gui*font: fixed
The name my_gui is defined in the WwInit command. For example:top = WwInit('my_gui', 'Examples', layout, /Vertical)You can also put the resource names in your .Xdefaults file, if you only need to customize your own version of the software. Either way, the new values of the resources will not take effect until the next time PV-WAVE is started.The second step is to install the resource file into the X resource database. The simplest way to install resources is to merge your resource file with X resource database using the following command:xrdb -merge resource_filenamewhere resource_filename is the name of your resource file.note | It is also possible to set the resources for particular widgets or groups of widgets in your application. To do this, you will have to know the names of all or some of the widgets in the widget hierarchy. (A widget’s name is determined by its placement in the hierarchy.) The more specific the widget hierarchy you provide, the fewer the number of widgets that are affected by the change. |
For more information about how widgets are related to one another, see "The Widget Hierarchy".
To find out widget names of particular Wave Widgets, refer to the appropriate Wave Widgets .pro files located in the standard library directory:
(UNIX) $RW_DIR/wave/lib/std/motif
(WIN) %RW_DIR%\wave\lib\std\windows
Where RW_DIR is the main Rogue Wave directory.
For more information about how to write and install X Window System resource files, refer to Volume 4 of the X Toolkit Intrinsics Programming Manual, O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 1990.
