20020924: how to change a frame's background color for printing (cont.)

>From: "Happel, Shelly" <address@hidden>
>Organization:  USF
>Keywords:  200209242035.g8OKZE111097 McIDAS MCGUI background

Hey Shelly,

>Thanks for the speedy repy!

No worries.

>The command worked to change the background
>color in the GUI until we issued the command to plot/contour temperature
>data (for example). 

You have to change the background color _after_ you do a plot.  The
reason is that the MCGUI restores a particular plaette to a frame
before running the plot commands.

>Is there a way to modify the background color so that all mcgui commands
>will adhere to the display color that we choose? 

I added restoration of the GRAPHIC palette to most commands run from
the MCGUI.  So, creating a custom color palette _not named GRAPHIC.GRX_
would not work with the MCGUI.

For reference, creating a new graphic palette is really easy.
Here is an example:

First, create a palette with the background color set to white:

SF 1
GU REST GRAPHIC
GU MAKE 0 WHITE
GU SAVE WHITEBKG

After the palette has been created, it can be restored to a frame from
the MCGUI Graphic Palette Restore button (the one with the crayons
as its icon).  Again, you would restore the palette AFTER doing the
plot.

Since the MCGUI restores the GRAPHIC palette to the frame for literally
all point plots (like meteorograms, temperature plots, etc), you can
not load the new palette into a frame and have it "stay" there.  The
thing I would advise you to not do -- just in case you were thinking of
doing it -- is change the contents of the GRAPHIC palette.  If you do,
your work will be lost the next time you update McIDAS _unless_
you create the new version of GRAPHIC.GRX and put it in every user's
McIDAS working directory (~mcidas/workdata for the user 'mcidas' and
~user/mcidas/data for all other users).

>Modifying the MCGUI print widget would be good as well -

OK.  I will look into doing this.  I think I will simply add the
ability to restore a palette to the frame before doing the save
into PostScript (tm).

>is there documentation for that?:-)

No, not really.  The entire MCGUI blueprint can only be found in my
head, and that is a mess ;-)

>Thanks Tom,

Later...

Tom