Atari Mega Archive 1/Atari Mega Archive - Volume 1.iso/lists/gem/l_0399/370

Internet Message Format | 1994-08-27 | 1.6 KB

Date: Wed, 8 Jun 94 13:44 CDT
From: [e-mail] (Evan K. Langlois)
To: [e-mail]
Subject: GEm Tip
Precedence: bulk


Here is a small tip for those of you still using standard RSC files for
dialogs.  Some of you have wanted more color in your dialogs, but find you
have to hack alot in the program code to adjust colors to be sure the
dialog is readable in mono or lower-color modes.

There is a little trick you can do to get all 16 colors in any dialog and
have it perfectly readable in ALL modes.  And it looks fine in mono too!
What you do is set the dialog background color to the opposite color
that you want it, now set the SELECTED bit, but do NOT set the selectable
bit.  The colors will inverse back to the original that you wanted in
the first place.  Now save the RSC.   When you load it under MONO, normally,
any color above 0 (WHITE) becomes black, giving you black on black, and
you can't read it, but the background is SELECTED, so it inverts to white
and you can read it like a normal dialog.

Buttons are a bit harder because they invert and your text and background
colors can't be set separately, however, you can stack text of any color
on top of a button of any color.  This allows you to set the attributes
for selected and selectability separately for the button, and then the
above trick will work for the object.

Try it, you can get some really nice looking 16 color dialogs (actually
4 or 5 colors per dialog, but you can use all 16 in the program, finding
a use for all 16 in one dialog is tough).   This works and your program
doesn't have to do any fix-ups.  It should work in a window, or with
form-do or with custom handlers.