line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

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Rick Graham
Posts: 45
Joined: Sun Jun 07, 2009 10:50 pm

line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

Post by Rick Graham »

with GUI ON the line draw characters supported by drawline.bmp and drawsunk.bmp are either too small or too large depending on which GRAPHIC_LINEDRAW option is chosen.

Are there morer than 4 GRAPHIC_LINEDRAW options available?

Has anyone modified the .bmp files to produce medium sized line draw characters?

Rick Graham
gordon
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Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:02 pm

Post by gordon »

Are you referring to the thickness of lines?
Susan Smith
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Location: Southern California

Post by Susan Smith »

Rick,

One other idea is to create a background graphic and plot your captions and data on top of it. I do that for certain things when I can't get the look I want from the BR "raw materials". It might take some tweaking to get the proportions you want, but with BR 4's ability to display graphics on the screen - either in a particular position or as a full-screen background - you have even more options.

-- Susan
GomezL
Posts: 258
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:51 am
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Drawline

Post by GomezL »

ON = A thin line (The windows line used by tabs & other controls).
RAISED = Fat lines, that look Raised (Drawline.bmp)
SUNKEN = Fat lines, that look sunken. (Drawsunk.bmp)

I am not sure when "ON" became the thin lines, but I really like them!

When you start implementing 2D controls, they all use "Thin Lines", it looks strange to combine the old Drawline with the new 2D controls.

Our approach to GUI was to "Re-write" components, basically one at a time until we reached out goal (all GUI), we are probably 95% there now.

Your example is begging for a GRID!

Until then, you can try something like this:

Code: Select all

00003   LET Orig_Gui$=Env$("GUIMODE") !:                                                
	EXECUTE "CON GUI OFF"

10 PRINT "YOUR PROGRAM GOES HERE"

00315   EXECUTE "CONFIG GUI "&Orig_Gui$

This will FORCE GUI OFF, and then restore it to it's original setting.
gordon
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:02 pm

Re: line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

Post by gordon »

I 2012 I shut down the ADS automotive product (for the most part). However there are still some customers that I maintain under Business Rules Corp. They are slowly going away and I am not soliciting any new customers. That being said the application has been substantially converted to GUI but there are programs that were either incompletely converted or not converted at all. My "solution" has been to let all such programs run with GUI OFF but to preserve the GUI MODE across calls. Fortunately, we always supported either mode when converting.

I have recently noticed that there are some confusing anomalies relating to GRAPHIC_LINEDRAW settings. If you specify anything other than RAISED or SUNKEN BR uses the default which is RAISED with GUI OFF and THINSUNK (or THIN ) with GUI ON. Unfortunately THINSUNK and THINRAISED are not supported with GUI OFF.

My problem is the switching from GUI ON to GUI OFF and the associated different linedraw defaults for selected programs is disconcerting and hokey. I have found that I'm better off using SUNKEN across the board.

One other thing I would emphasize is the need to specify FONT Lucida Console for a fairly uniform look between GUI ON and OFF. I also want to reassert that in 4.3 client server, these files go on the server in BR server directory.

Now I was wondering if anyone had developed a thinner image drawsunk.bmp file. If so please speak up.
GomezL
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Re: line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

Post by GomezL »

We have played with DrawLine, and attached I have some of the results we came up with.

DrawLine.bmp is what we ended up finding to be our "Best Result".

There are two Drawline_Thim samples.
Attachments
Drawline_Samples.zip
(5.53 KiB) Downloaded 690 times
John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

Re: line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

Post by John »

Here's the one I use - but I don't actually use it. I believe it was designed to assist me in identifying which part was which.
Attachments
DrawLine - ACS 4.zip
(964 Bytes) Downloaded 697 times
John Bowman
gordon
Posts: 358
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:02 pm

Re: line drawing with 4.X versions of BR

Post by gordon »

After reviewing the variants provided by ACS and CLS I have selected the attached renditions of drawline and drawsunk.

Drawline is activated by GRAPHIC_LINEDRAW RAISED. This version provides a modern flat appearance instead of raised.

Drawsunk is activated by GRAPHIC_LINEDRAW SUNKEN. It gives a decent sunken appearance which is thinner than the original drawsunk, although it is not as thin as the GUI ON native thin sunken lines.

The selection between the two should be based on the other attributes of your legacy application running with GUI OFF.

================================================================================================

One other critical note. I have found that on many workstations, specifying FONT Lucida Console provides Lucida Console captions, but the data entry text is Terminal or some other font. The way to get both captions and data entry text to be Lucida console is to specify two font statements as follows:

FONT Lucida Console
FONT 3DFONT=Lucida Console
Attachments
drawline2.zip
(1.42 KiB) Downloaded 693 times
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