I’m looking for a way to set a field to “greyed out” (in a printed report) based on the contents of the field on a per-record basis. I guess conditional text coloring will work but I want to background to change color too…and I know how to do that! I think I just answered my own question but if there’s a super easy way to do this I’d love to hear it !
It seems to be impossible to set the transparency of an image display object in the same way I can set the color… Oh how I yearn for the flash art scrapbook!
It seems to be impossible to set the transparency of an image display object in the same way I can set the color… Oh how I yearn for the flash art scrapbook!
Huh? I don’t remember any transparency feature of the flash art scrapbook.
It’s possible for a PNG image to contain an alpha channel. If it does, the Image Display object will use that information. So you can create a “mask” so that only part of the image is opaque. I think Pixelmator can generate such an image, though I’m not sure because I haven’t done that in years.
If I use an image display object and I command it to display a color using something like this:
Yes, this is documented. You can also display a gradient this way.
I can control transparency on the fly by using eight character hex codes, with the last two digits are for transparency.
I don’t think that is documented, but yes, it does work
Well, in the old days, before we could procedurally generate geometry, I used to keep images in the flash art scrapbook that were called “red_bar”, “green_bar” , “yellow_bar”, etc. Sometimes, it was useful for the bars to have transparency, so i could save a file with an alpha channel and the color bar would take its transparency from the values in the a channel of an rgba file. Nowadays, if i want a color bar I can generate it on the fly in whatever color I want, no advance planning necessary. But the transparency is set as an attribute of the object itself, not as a component of the color. So (according to documentation), I can’t easily vary transparency based on data. (It wasn’t that easy back in FAS days, I had to have multiple graphics premade. So it was easy but it required that the graphic elements were prepared in advance) Anyway, I read about the 8 character HTML color syntax and tried it, with little confidence that it would work. But it did, and I was happy.
It wasn’t that easy back in FAS days, I had to have multiple graphics premade. So it was easy but it required that the graphic elements were prepared in advance
Ok, so that wasn’t a feature of Flash Art Scrapbook, it was a feature of the image. And you’ve been able to do the same thing all along with the Panorama X Image Display feature. PNG images have an alpha channel, so you’ve been able to do this all along in Panorama X/. (JPEG images do not support alpha, so if you’ve only used JPEG format you may have been unaware of this.)
This seems to be operating system dependent. I’m still using Big Sur on this old Mac, and when I try this, it just ignores the first two hex digits and uses the last six. The digits I intended to be the transparency become the blue component. The blue becomes the green, and the green becomes the red.
True, it’s not like X made anything harder… it just made some things easier…so I thought my days of having to premake color bars were over. Which they were, until I needed transparency. And then they were again, when I discovered this. My adventures in procedural transparency began under Tahoe so etc
This seems to be operating system dependent. I’m still using Big Sur on this old Mac, and when I try this, it just ignores the first two hex digits and uses the last six. The digits I intended to be the transparency become the blue component. The blue becomes the green, and the green becomes the red.
Actually, my bad, I took Chris’s word for it that this works. I did some more digging into this, and for me it doesn’t work on any version of macOS that I have handy. It works exactly as @Dave describes. And looking at the source code, there’s no way it could work - the code hard codes the opacity to 1.0.
I think the code could actually be changed to make it work the way @watts describes, but it doesn’t work that way now. No wonder it isn’t documented! Chris, I wonder why you think that it worked??
Erm thats embarrassing. This is one of those coding hallucinations that arise in the early hours of the morning, and vanish without a trace under the scrutiny of rest and daylight.
I swear it did work by candlelight! But in the morning all my objects contained six-character html colors. I think i was fooled by having a grey box beneath my text and by a stray text object that varied the text color. So when black text on white paper turned into grey text on a grey box, I assumed it was transparency at work.
This is one of those coding hallucinations that arise in the early hours of the morning, and vanish without a trace under the scrutiny of rest and daylight.
Yeah, been there.
Maybe this is a fortunate hallucination. I think that it actually could work this way, so I’m consider this a suggestion for a possible improvement
