Actually, removing the border is what we do for non-editable fields. We set
the shadowthickness resource of the Motif widget to 0 and set the background
color of the textfield widget to be 80% darker than the background color of
the window (which are all pastels--LightSteelBlue, Gray75, MistyRose2,
PaleTurquiose3, Bisque). The rule is simple, if an object can be manipulated
(e.g., a control, an editable textfield) it is three dimensional in
appearance. If an object cannot be manipulated, as in a display only
textfield, it is two dimensional. This is specified in the Theater Battle
Management Human Computer Interface Specification currently being used by the
US Air Force.
--------------------------------------
Date: 5/31/95 8:38 AM
To: Charles Bowen
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Subject: metacard-list V1 #2
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metacard-list Wednesday, 31 May 1995 Volume 01 : Number 002
This digest's subjects:
Re: Shadow Thickness
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Scott Raney <raney@metacard.com>
Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 10:21:06 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: Re: Shadow Thickness
>
> Subject: Shadow Thickness
>
> Is there a way to adjust the shadow thickness of various MetaCard objects.
We
> use a different shadow thickness to distinguish a data entry field from a
data
> display field.
A thicker *shadow* isn't to difficult to create (though I suspect that
this isn't what you're really asking for). Just create a field or
button with showBorder set to false and a dark background color and
put it underneath your field, offset down and to the left by whatever
"thickness" you want.
If you want thicker *borders*, things get a little more complicated.
One technique would be to put several objects on top of each other,
with the lower layers slightly larger than the upper. This would work
fine for fields, but is a little complicated for buttons where you
would have to toggle the colors of the all the objects below the
button when the button is pressed. You could also use a graphic or
paint a thicker border, but again you'd have the problem of setting
the colors if you're using a button.
Just FYI, in MetaCard 2.0 you'll be able to set a control's border
width and shadow thickness directly.
All this begs the question, however, of why you're even considering
using this technique. None of the GUI style guides mention it and so
I suspect that it will just be confusing to users of your application.
Better, I think, would be to either just remove the borders from your
non-editable fields (the standard), or set the background color and/or
fonts of the editable fields different from the editable ones (a
technique used in some database front-end toolkits).
- --
***********************************************************************
* Scott Raney 303-447-3936 Remember: the better you look, *
* raney@metacard.com the more you'll see -- Lidia *
***********************************************************************
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End of metacard-list V1 #2
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