One of the advantages of working in the X Window System environment on a Silicon Graphics workstation is the wide choice of screen colors you have to work with. It can also be a disadvantage if you consider the number of color choices combined with the 500 plus customizable resources available in Motif. The CASEVision environment provides a number of predefined color and font collections for the tool windows referred to as schemes. The scheme approach e liminates the endless details involved with specifying resources. By making the single choice of a scheme, you can easily change the tones of all your CASEVision windows. You also have a choice of two font sizes for text appearing in the windows. Together, these options help make the CASEVision tools easy to view and the text within them easy to read.
This chapter covers the following topics:
The CASEVision schemes have been designed for specific purposes. They take into account preference for light or dark text, color intensity, red-green color-blind users, and monochrome displays. CASEVision offers twelve different color schemes for CASEVision tool windows, as shown in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1. CASEVision Color Schemes
Scheme name | Text / Background | Comments |
|---|---|---|
Leonardo | Dark on light | Low intensity colors |
Lascaux | Light on dark | Silicon Graphics look, used as default scheme |
Whistler | Light on dark | Darkest scheme |
Turner | Light on dark | Bright, contemporary colors |
Sargent | Light on dark | Conservative, darker colors |
VanGogh | Light on dark | Purple-base |
Titian | Dark on light | Same as Lascaux but with a peach cast |
Gainsborough | Light on dark | Good for color-blindness, no red / green contrasts |
Rembrandt | Light on dark | Greens and browns |
Willis | Dark on light | For black-and-white terminals, with fewer fonts |
Monet | Light on dark | Pastels |
Dark on light | Gray-scale for printing black-and-white screen captures |
These color schemes are shown in Figure 1-1 through Figure 1-12.
When you start any of the tools in a UNIX shell, you can choose one of these color schemes by adding the option -scheme <color> in the command line. <color> is the name of the color scheme you want to use. For example, to start the Static Analyzer using the Whistler color scheme, you use the command:
cvstatic -scheme Whistler |
When you start a tool without specifying a color scheme, the tool appears in the default color scheme, which is set initially to Lascaux. To set a different default color scheme, add this line to your .Xdefaults file:
*scheme: <color> |
where <color> is the name of the color scheme you want. The .Xdefaults file is located in your home directory. If you don't have an .Xdefaults file, you can create one to hold the color scheme line. For example, the line
*scheme: Leonardo |
in the .Xdefaults file sets the default color scheme to Leonardo. If you're using only .Xdefaults, then the next CASEVision tool you start will be in the new color scheme. If you're using xrdb, then you need to reload the database by typing
xrdb -load -/.xdefaults |
For more information on setting X defaults, consult X Window System User's Guide, OSF Motif Edition (Volume III) by Tim O'Reilly, Valerie Quercia, and Linda Lamb-O'Reilly and Associates, ISBN 0-937175-61-7.
CASEVision offers two font sizes for text displayed in its tools: large and small. When you start a tool, CASEVision tests the resolution of the monitor you're using to see if it offers high or low resolution.
If you're using a high-resolution screen, CASEVision defaults to a large font size to make text easily readable. On the other hand, the small font enables you to see more text on the screen at one time. You can switch to small font if you prefer by adding the following line to your .Xdefaults file:
*useSmallFonts: True |
This causes all subsequent CASEVision tools to use the small font size. To return to the large font size, either delete the line from .Xdefaults or change True to False.
If you're using a low-resolution screen, CASEVision defaults to the small font size because windows with the large font are too big for the screen. You can't override the default small font size if you have a low-resolution monitor.