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The Display window & changing colours

The available work area of the main display window is automatically sized to accommodate the configured printer paper size at the maximum available scale (400%) in either portrait or landscape orientation. However, its visible size will, of course, be less than the available area.
When loading a new calendar file, the visible window size will initially automatically show the whole calendar if the specified display scale (i.e. the scale value saved as part of that particular calendar file) is less than a user-configurable value - 60%, as supplied. If the specified display scale is higher than this the initial visible window size will be the same as if it had been the user-configurable value (e.g. 60%) and not all of the calendar will be visible. (After this initial opening, of course, the user can change the visible window size and view any part of the calendar area with the toggle, adjust buttons and/or scroll bars.)

The calendar is displayed on a representation of the configured printer paper (in White) complete with any non-printing borders shown (as a Dark Grey surround). There is also a small margin in the window at the top and left of the ‘paper’ merely for cosmetic purposes: it never appears in print..
User interactions directly with the Display window are concerned only with changing the colours of the various displayed elements. In general, clicking with any button over any element will lead to a menu tree allowing the colours relevant to that element to be changed. The only exception to this is that the colours for Red Letter Days are handled in one of the ‘Edit calendar design’ window sub-panes - see later.
Thus, to choose colours for the date area (i.e. box­fill, date text and outline colours) a button is clicked while the pointer is within the date area. This opens a menu covering the separate elements and a sub-menu tree leads to a colour-picker window or a menu of previously-saved named colours. Depending on the actual format, the date and days boxes and the date/day text can be coloured individually or as whole rows/columns etc. The button click needs to be made within the required box/row/column in these cases. The best policy here is to ‘suck it and see’.
The following screen-shot shows the colour menu tree available after clicking over one of the date area boxes in Format 1.
Picture Pics/pic003.png
Once a colour has been chosen and the OK button pressed in the Colour Picker window (or a name selected from the saved colour-name menu) the colour change takes place immediately without the need to use the Update button - and, again, an asterisk will appear in the display window title, if not already there.
The precise menu tree options for changing the colours depends on the format. For example, in Formats 1-4 the colours of the date and/or day text and their respective box­fill colours can be changed on an individual box basis - or the colour can be applied to a whole row or column, or all boxes made the same.
Contrast this with Format 5 where the colour choices are more appropriately applied to ‘Every same day’ e.g. every Tuesday in the same colour.
In Formats 7, 8 and 10 - which display a whole year to a page - the choices are necessarily more limited but separate colours for the different elements are still available.
For background/box-fill colours and outline/grid colours the option to choose ‘no colour’ is provided. Effectively, this makes the area/line transparent and anything ‘beneath’ it will then be visible.
For a few elements - the week text colour, the ordinal dates colour, the moon phase colour, the calendar outline colour and the picture area outline colour - access to the colour-changing menu is by clicking <menu> over any part of the display window not occupied by another element. (In Format 8 the week colour is accessible from two menus, but this is purely for user-convenience.)
When any Colour Picker window initially opens, the colour currently applied to the element concerned will be displayed in the Colour Picker window. The same applies to the small window used to save colours with a user-chosen name.

If any element overlaps another area then the one ‘above’ will take precedence with the mouse pointer i.e. the colours in, say, an individual box in the date area will not be able to be changed if the Month box or Year box is hiding it. So, if you intend to superimpose the Month box and/or Year box on top of other areas it is best to keep them out of the way until the colours of these other areas are completed.

It is worth noting that, when changing colours, the display necessarily has to be redrawn after every colour selection. This is not an issue with most formats, but in the very ‘busy’ Formats 7 and 8 the redrawing can take a few seconds each time (depending on the speed of your machine).

Finally, some design elements (i.e. all text items plus moon phases, picture and calendar outlines) cannot be given ‘no colour’ and that option will accordingly not be available in the colour-picker window in those cases. By the same token, if there is a ‘no colour’ item saved as a named colour it will have no effect if it is selected for one of these cases.






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