Menu

Common Properties for Visual Controls

There are a number of Properties which are common to most of Helm’s Visual Controls.

Interaction control
Name Enter a unique name for the item, using the characters A−Z, a−z, 0−9 and “_”. The software is not case-sensitive (i.e. “fred”, “Fred”, “freD” and “FRED” are all regarded as the same name). When you add a control to a panel it automatically receives a unique name, but it is recommended that you change this name to something more meaningful.
Miscellaneous
Enabled True: the control is active
False: the control is inactive
Panel Layout
Height Height of the control (in pixels)
Width Width of the control (in pixels)
Left Left-hand pixel position of the control . Zero is at the left-hand edge of the panel
Top Top pixel position of the item. Zero is at the top of the panel
Visual Appearance
Align Locks the control to an edge of the panel.
alTop aligns the control to the top of the panel. its width follows any adjustment to the panel width.
alLeft, alRight and alBottom align to the other edges.
Alignment Determines how text is aligned within the control :

  • taCenter centres the text within the control .
  • taLeftJustify left-justifies the text.
  • taRightJustify right-justifies the text.
Color The colour of the text: choose a colour from the list, or create a colour (double-click in the field, then use the Windows colour selection dialog.
For a specific RGB value, enter “$BBGGRR”, where BB, RR and GG are 2-digit hexadecimal values; so $00FF00 gives 100% green.
FontFile Enter the name of the Truetype Font file to be used for the control
Look Contains various properties which affect the “look” of the text on buttons and button groups. These are:

  • Alignment: see above.
  • FontFile: see above.
  • TextCol: the colour of the text.
  • TextOpac: the opacity of the text (a number between 0 and 1; see “Opacity” below).
  • PointSize: size of the text; see “PointSize” below.
  • TextLeft, TextTop: offsets of the text position from the normal position of text on a button.
Opacity A number between 0 and 1, where 0 is fully transparent and 1 is fully opaque
PointSize The point size of the typeface to be used for the control
ShadowDistance A floating-point number giving the distance of the drop-shadow text from the main text. To disable drop shadow, set this to zero.
Text The text displayed in the control
Visible True: the control will be visible.
False: the control will be hidden.