How can I add a background image to my delphi form? I added a TImage, but now the labels aren't visible any more, and the texts of my checkboxes are in a blue "box" (blue is the background color i chose). This blue doesn't look very good on the background image, and the hidden labels also don't look good. How do I fix these problems?
For the labels: make sure that they are transparent (Transparent property in the Object Inspector), and that they are on top of the TImage in the Z-order of controls. To correct this you can execute the "Send to back" command on the TImage component in design mode, it will make all other non-windowed controls appear on top of it.
For the checkboxes I don't know what the problem in your case is, in Delphi 2007 checkboxes appear properly transparent when put over a TImage. Maybe you use an earlier Delphi version? If so it would be good to mention this in the question. There may also be a different behaviour depending on whether themes are active. Again, hard to say without further information.
Move the TImage to the back of the form (right click, order -> send to back).
For labels, set the Transparent property to true. For checkboxes and radio buttons, at least in Delphi 6 which is all I have access to, there is no transparent property. The way round this is to reduce the controls label to zero size and the provide your own additional TLabel, which can be transparent.
Can I also say that I find windows with background images ultra naff, and I know I'm not alone in this.
Related
I need to have a circular UIButton that draws a custom color in the middle, along with an outer ring that is drawn as the default tint color (similar to a UIColorWell).
I've tried a few different approaches:
Using a multicolor SFSymbol: This would be an elegant solution, but as far as I can tell there's no way to apply the tint color to just a part of the image while setting the center to be a custom color. Either the entire image is tinted, or the image is drawn as the default colors set in the symbol file. Also, I need to support iOS 14, while the new hierarchical options that may allow me to accomplish this were added to iOS 15.
Setting various layer properties (ie, cornerRadius, borderColor, etc): This works and may be a decent fallback solution, but I'm unable to get the look that I'm going for (namely, having a transparent ring between the outer border and inner colored circle).
If there's a way to use either of the above options, please educate me! Either one seems like a better solution than:
Overloading the draw function: This is the option I'm going with at the moment, as it allows me to have complete creative control over the look of the button. The rest of this post will be regarding this method.
So far I was able to get the button to be drawn exactly as I wanted. However, I am unable to figure out how to draw the button appropriately with regards to various state changes.
For example, if a popover is displayed, all of the normal buttons are automatically redrawn as disabled. My custom button, however, isn't redrawn so I am unable to respond to the state change.
Same thing with tapping on the button - normal buttons are briefly shown in an emphasized color but my custom button doesn't respond.
Does someone have an example as to how to support overriding UIButton drawing with various states?
I was able to get the desired behavior by overriding tintColorDidChange in order to trigger a redraw of the button. Now I am able to draw the outer ring in the correct color (including grayed out when a popover is displayed) while maintaining the desired inner color.
I have to use TStaticText instead of TLabel to make my software friendly to screen-readers because TStaticText has window handle and TLabel does not.
However, even though TStaticText has Transparent property, it is not really transparent on a gradient background.
Can anyone recommend way how to make it transparent or perhaps how to make a simple custom component which would be compatible with screen readers (having window handle that is) and be transparent at the same time?
I'd like to scroll an individual TabSheet within a PageControl if the height of the sheet becomes less than a value.
If I put a ScrollBox on the TabSheet, the themed background of the TabSheet is not painted (it's overwritten by the single color background of the scrollbox).
I've been trying to find / create a transparent scrollbox component with no luck. Any other ideas?
I'm using Delphi 7.
Thanks!
To answer my own question, TMS has a transparent scrollbox component called "TAdvScrollBox" that works with themed tabsheets too:
http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/asb.asp
Maybe this will help somebody:
There is a small bug with the component that turns the ParentCtl3d property to false causing ListViews to be rendered with a black border instead of a 3d one. It's easy to fix by setting ParentCtl3d to true programmatically on FormCreate.
Tpanel does not show the top and left border under Delphi XE/Win 7.
Why?
Example (I just dropped few TPanel from pallete to my form, inside of a TTabSheet):
How do I make it look like the original Delphi 7 control (with all 4 borders), without changeing its properties every time I place it on my form?
Set ParentBackground to false.
Above is a blue panel on a green form (ParentBackground = false). Notice the white upper-left border and the gray bottom-right border. Of course, if both the form and the panel are white, the white border will become invisible.
That is how it meant to be drawn. The 3D effect is as if there was a light source shining from the top left. That's why the bottom and right edges are in a shadow cast by the raised panel.
Regarding your updated question, it sounds like you want your application to run without themes. The easiest way is to uncheck "Enable runtime themes" in the Application pane of the project settings.
But of course that would look odd nowadays. If you are using the panel to group related controls, perhaps a group box would be better. My instincts are that panels with raised borders will look poor on modern themed Windows.
By setting a MIM_MAXHEIGHT with SetMenuInfo, I can control the max height of a [popup]menu. When the menu appears, if it needs more height than MIM_MAXHEIGHT, it will have 2 scrollbuttons (one at the top, the second at the bottom)
I do draw myself the menuitems to theme them with various flavours.
But my OnDrawItem or OnMeasureItem are never called for drawing the scrollbuttons.
So my question is : How to ownerdraw the scroll buttons in a scrollable Tmenu (or Tpopupmenu)? Is it even possible?
Looking at the MSDN documentaiton, I don't think you can not owerdraw those buttons, as they are not part of the menu items, but of the menu itself.
The menu itself only has very few flags you can define; the only modify the background.
This link describes (an English translation of) how to to this.
Or this link on the Embarcadero forum.
What is possible is to set a background color to the menu (MIM_BACKGROUND) and giving to the hbrBack member a Tbrush.handle with a predefined color.
that is not perfect but often, themes use a single color to backgroud the menuitems. By this way, the scroll buttons will be colored with the background color