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The Set Color Button: Set Colors Panel

The Set Color command brings up the Color Selection panel, which contains control sliders that are manipulated to set the components of the color of the currently selected layer or other drawing attribute. If the Print Control panel (induced by the Print button in the File Menu) is visible, the color set will be used for rendering the plot, if the plot driver supports definable colors.

Near the top of the panel is a pull-down menu plus a ``radio group'' of three buttons. The three buttons allow the pull-down menu to contain different sets of entries. Each entry represents a color that can be adjusted.

The three buttons provide the following sets of menu entries:

Attributes button
These are the colors used in the drawing windows. Most of these colors can be separately set while in electrical or physical mode.

Current Layer Current layer color
Background Drawing window background color
Coarse Grid Color used for coarse grid lines
Fine Grid Color used for fine grid lines
Ghosting Color used for ``sprites'' attached to the mouse pointer
Highlighting Color used for highlighting, such as for DRC errors
Selection Color 1 One of two alternating colors used for selections
Selection Color 2 One of two alternating colors used for selections
Terminals Electrical terminals
Instance Boundary Boundary color of unexpanded instance
Instance Name Text Name text color in unexpanded instance
Instance Size Text Size text color in unexpanded instance, physical mode only


Prompt button
These are the colors used in the prompt line and status line.

Text Normal prompt line text
Prompt Text Text color used for prompting
Highlight Text Text color used for hypertext references
Cursor Text cursor color
Background Normal background color
Edit Background Background color while editing

Plot Marks button
These are the colors of the plot point marks used in electrical mode to indicate a node or current being plotted by WRspice. The default colors are the same as the trace colors used by WRspice for plotting.

The entries are: Plot Mark 1 to Plot Mark 18.

In Windows, there are three sliders which control the red, green, and blue intensity, plus a sample window. The sample window is a drag source, so that colors can be transferred by dragging and dropping into the layer table. In most cases, the updated colors will not be visible until the screen is redrawn.

In Unix/Linux, there are six sliders which can adjust the red, green, and blue values, or the hue, saturation, and intensity values. Note that the sliders automatically track the current color setting. To the left is a color wheel, which provides another means of setting the hue and saturation, by dragging the small circular marker with the mouse. To the right of the color wheel is a rectangular area with a horizontal marker. Dragging the marker provides another means of changing the intensity.

Below the color wheel (Unix/Linux) is a rectangular area split into two fields. The left field shows the last color loaded into the color editor. The right color is the current color. One can drag the current color to one of the layer table layers, to set the color for that layer. This is cool, but the color of the current layer is automatically updated anyway. Note that except for pseudo-color visual modes (``8-bit'' or 256 color displays) the main display will not show the new color until redrawn.

The color wheel, sample area, and saturation display are not shown in pseudo-color (256-color) modes, since in this case the colormap is not capable of rendering these. Rather, a large, unattractive gray area is presented instead.

The Colors button brings up a listing of color names and RGB values. Clicking on a list entry will load that color into the color selector. The names are obtained from the system rgb.txt file under Unix/Linux, or from an internal list in Windows. This file is assumed to exist in the following location:

FreeBSD/Linux /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt
Solaris /usr/openwin/lib/X11/rgb.txt

The changes to the underlying object or attribute color can be made by moving the sliders, selecting a color from the Colors menu, etc. The color change may or may not be immediately visible on screen. In some cases, one may have to force a redraw to see the color change. For example, if one of the Prompt colors is changed, one may have to move another window over the prompt line, then off, to send an expose event to the prompt line window which will force a redraw.

When the Print Control Panel panel is visible, i.e., in hard copy mode, the colors set will be used in that mode only, and in the plots if the printer driver supports it.


next up previous contents index
Next: The Set Fill Button: Up: The Attributes Menu: Set Previous: The Set Grid Button:   Contents   Index
Stephen R. Whiteley 2006-10-23