I am trying to build a custom control which can draw the outline and pins of an integrated circuit.
At present I am using 2 frames, one holding a panel which will represent the package outline. THis frame will be place on a form. The other frame will represent a pin which will contain a shape to represent the pin and two labels, one for pin number one for pin description. My plan is to create the pins dynamically according to package aspect ratio and number of pins.
Are frames a good basis for this or are there better alternatives.
A frame is a good starting point but is heavy. Probably the best solution is to build a custom control. As ancestor, you could start either with TGraphicControl or TWinControl depending on the features you need. Read the documentation to select the best fit for your case.
TCustomControl which derive from TWinControl is a good ancestor for controls that wrap Windows screen objects but perform their own rendering.
The documentation I linked above gives examples of controls.
Related
I am trying to build a gantt control with Konva (does it make sense to use Konva for this)? I have tried to sketch the control below:
I was thinking of breaking down the Konvas stage as follows:
One stage with 4 layers: activity names, timeline, activity views, and scrollbar view.
The scrollbar layer would contain a "custom control" mimicking a standard scrollbar control.
At this stage I have a couple if questions:
What would be the best approach for synchronizing the different layers from an event handling perspective? For example if the user click's on the scrollbar's down arrow shape, I would need to "scroll" all layers one unit down.
How does the Konva coordinate system work? Is the drawing of shapes done relative to the containing layer?
What's the difference between a layer and a group? Does it make more sense to use a group instead of layers?
I realize my questions are very broad in nature, but at this point I need to get the design right.
I am responding here rather than as a comment because I have more to say than a comment allows.
I have made Gantts with both HTML elements, and another canvas lib, and Konva. I used Divs with jquery first and it was viable but I felt it got quite complicated and it ran out of steam in the area of zooming the view. You can't hide from the complexity of course. Switching to HTML5 canvas I realised that a lib like Konva would accelerate production. And zooming in canvas is simple.
As per #lavrton's comment, the text is primitive on HTML5 canvas when compared to GDI, or other, more mature tech. My answer for the labels on tasks was to use off-screen text drawing then converting to images which works very well. For popup editing, I revert to HTML divs etc. I did not use animations in the Gantt but I have elsewhere and canvas should be fine - there are plenty of bouncy-ball / particle tests around to confirm that.
As a coding design suggestion, the data model and functionality of the Gantt is consistent whatever tech you use to draw it with. I recommend you consider proceeding with a layered approach where your interaction with drawing functions is wrapped as class methods in a drawing class so that you can switch out the drawing tech itself should you feel the need. You could insulate yourself from the choice of tech and/or library that way.
Turning to aspects of your question:
layers are a useful concept. Physically each layer is an HTML5 canvas element. So multiple layers in one diagram are really multiple canvases over the same stage. The benefit here is in redrawing specific layers instead of the entire canvas where there are performance savings. But mostly you can ignore the physical and just get on and use the concept which works well.
groups: a group is a collection of shapes on a layer. If you have to draw things made of many shapes, grouping them is very useful because you can move the group as a whole, hide it, delete it, etc. You might, for example, consider making each taskbar, composed of at least a rectangle and text, as being a group. One consideration for groups is that the location and size of the group is that of the bounding rectangle that encloses the shapes within it. This can cause some confusion until you work out an approach. You will find yourself using layers and groups, but mostly groups for drawing controls.
Zooming / scaling: this is easy with a canvas. Less easy is the math for how to change the offset to keep the same view as you zoom, but again it is achievable.
Synchronised scrolling layers is not going to take any time to develop - just set the layer y-position for each layer.
Drawing the grid of rows for activity and columns for days/weeks/months/etc should not be underestimated as a task, but as you develop it you will learn the fundamentals of working with Konva.
Final point - the docs and examples for Konva could be a bit better, but the community support here and at https://konvajs.github.io/docs/ is good, and the Konva source code is also at that site so you can delve right in to understand what is happening, though you do not need to do that at all if it is not your thing.
I'm making a GUI for selecting regions to crop from images. I have been using Seesaw and cans select rectangular regions, but cannot find a way to set an image to the background of seesaw.canvas. This suggests using icons on labels. Can I make a label paintable and then use it as a canvas? Is there a way to overlap a label and a canvas or somehow use a panel that gives a background to its contents?
I think Quil has this functionality, but I'm not sure how to build a GUI around its draw, setup, sketch form if I want add widgets.
Existing solutions would appreciated as well, as long as I can decompose them. Using GIMP or Photoshop isn't an option for the workflow I want: multiple crops per photo, of different kinds on each page and different metadata added depending on the type of image outlined. Any suggestions for libraries for working with metadata for photos? I was planning on using a shell interface to exiftool, but a more portable option may be better.
You can draw a java.awt.Image (or sub-class) to a canvas with seesaw.graphics/image-shape:
(require '[seesaw.graphics :as g])
(defn paint-canvas [c g2d]
(g/draw g2d (g/image-shape my-image 0 0) (g/style)))
It seems like that should do it.
Also note that labels (and all Seesaw widgets) are paintable. Just set the :paint option like on a canvas and paint away.
SPSS' default settings for graphs are pretty rudimentary and, generally, ugly.
I have just upgraded from v.12 to v.21 and am very surprised, and extremely disappointed, to see that there is practically no change.
I had high hopes for GPL, but it does not seem to offer anything more than basic settings.
For instance, I want to create a sequence of scatterplots.
The dimension should be 375 points square.
Both axes should go to 1,000.
The points should be size 1, colour dark red.
The chart background should be white.
I also want to create a sequence of scatterplots.
The dimension should be 375 points square.
X axis should go to 1,000,
Y axis to 160.
There should be 50 bins - (x-axis, number of intervals).
Display digit grouping should be on.
Histogram bar fill and border should be colour a and colour b (these will vary, but should be scripted).
Finally, a set of box plots which also need customisation away from the default settings.
So, is it possible to script customisations like this, or do I have to go through the VERY SLOW and TEDIOUS point and click process for every one?
I HAVE 105 GRAPHS!
Thanks for your advice.
GPL provides syntax control for all of these things. The graphics engine in V21 is entirely different and much more flexible than the ancient on in V12.
The Chart Builder UI offers only basic, general controls. There is a huge amount of functionality in GPL that is not exposed in the CB. Paste the syntax from that as a starting point, and look at the GPL documentation in the help. You may also want to create a template with your specifications and use that from the CB as a shortcut.
The GraphBoard editor provides another interface ultimately to the same graphics engine. It offers more aesthetic control but is harder to customize.
let's say I want to display a customizable (2D, cartoon-like) character, where some properties e.g. eye color, hair style, clothing etc can be chosen from a predefined set of options. Now I want to animate the character. What's the best way to deal with the customization?
1) For example, I could make a sprite sheet for each combination of properties. That's not very memory efficient and not very flexible, but probably gives the best performance.
2) I could compose the character from various layers, where each property only affects one layer. Thus, I could make a sprite-sheet for the body, a collection of sprite-sheets for the eyes (one for each eye color) etc.
2a) In that case, I could merge the selected sprite-sheets in order to generate a single sprite-sheet containing the animation of the customized character.
2b) Alternatively, I could keep the sprite-sheets separate and try to animate them simultaneously as layers. I fear, that this might become a problem performance-wise.
3) I could try to modify the layers programmatically, e.g. use a sprite-sheet for the eyes as a mask and map some texture on it before merging it down to a single sprite-sheet. I would think this is a very flexible approach when it comes to simple properties like eye colors, but might become difficult for things like hair-style. I am aware that this depends much on the character and probably a general answer is difficult.
I assume that my problem is not new, so there is probably a standard approach to it.
Concerning the platform, I'm particularly interested in iOS and try to avoid OpenGL (well, I'm open-minded). Maybe there is a nice framework that can help me here?
Thanks!
Depending on what your working on, you might want to animate part/all of the animations outside in another tool, such as flash. It is much easier to work with a visual environment.
Then there are tools that take swf files, and create sprite sheets that you would then animate in cocos2d.
That is a common game creation workflow.
You problably want to take a look on how to create sprites at cocos2d.
Cocos2d comes with a set of tools that help you to animate single parts and offers abstractions to compose parts (like CCBatchNode or CCNode). Also, it comes with tools that helps you to pack sprites into sprite sheets (e.g Texture Packer) and develop levels (e.g Level Helper).
Cocos2d is an open source framework and it is widely used. You also have cocos3d but I never used it :).
I am preparing to start on a C++ DirectX 10 application that will consist of multiple "panels" to display different types of information. I have had some success experimenting with multiple viewports on one RenderTargetView. However, I cannot find a definitive answer regarding how to clear a single viewport at a time. These panels (viewports) in my application will overlap in some areas, so I would like to be able to draw them from "bottom to top", clearing each viewport as I go so the drawing from lower panels doesn't show through on the higher ones. In DirectX 9, it seems that there was a Clear() method of the device object that would clear only the currently set viewport. DirectX 10 uses ClearRenderTargetView(), which clears the entire drawing area, and I cannot find any other option that is equivalent to the way DirectX 9 did it.
Is there a way in DirectX 10 to clear only a viewport/rectangle within the drawing area? One person speculated that the only way may be to draw a quad in that space. It seems that another possibility would be to have a seprate RenderTargetView for each panel, but I would like to avoid that as it requires other redundant resources, such as a separate depth/stencil buffers (unless that is a misunderstanding on my part).
Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
I would recommend using one render target per "viewport", and compositing them together using quads for the final view. I know of no way to scissor a clear in DX 10.
Also, according to the article here, "An array of render-target views may be passed into ID3D10Device::OMSetRenderTargets, however all of those render-target views will correspond to a single depth stencil view."
Hope this helps.
Could you not just create a shader together with the appropriate blendstate settings and a square mesh (or other shape of mesh) and use it to clear the area where you want to clear? I haven't tried this but I think it can be done.