The Set Color Button: Set Colors Panel

The Set Color button in the Attributes Menu brings up the Color Selection panel. The panel can also be displayed by clicking on a layer in the layer table or layer palette with button 3 while holding down the Ctrl key. The current layer will become the clicked-on layer, and its color will be loaded into the editor.

The panel contains controls that are manipulated to set the components of the color of the currently selected layer or other drawing attribute. If the Print Control panel (induced by the Print button in the File Menu) is visible, the color set will be used for rendering the plot, if the plot driver supports definable colors.

Along the top of the panel are three drop-down menus. The leftmost menu selects between Electrical and Physical, which for attributes whose color differs between modes, this specifies which color to display or set.

The second menu contains two or three choices: Attributesa and Prompt Line, and in the case where the first menu choice is Electrical, a thrid choice Plot Marks is available. The choice here will determine the content of the third menu. Each entry of the third menu represents a color that can be adjusted.

The third menu choices for the three choices in the second menu are described below.

Attributes
These are the colors used in the drawing windows. Most of these colors can be separately set while in electrical or physical mode.

Current Layer	Current layer color
Background	Drawing window background color
Coarse Grid	Color used for coarse grid lines
Fine Grid	Color used for fine grid lines
Ghosting	Color used for ``sprites'' attached to the mouse pointer
Highlighting	Color used for highlighting, such as for DRC errors
Selection Color 1	One of two alternating colors used for selections
Selection Color 2	One of two alternating colors used for selections
Terminals	Electrical terminals
Instance Boundary	Boundary color of unexpanded instance
Instance Name Text	Name text color in unexpanded instance
Instance Size Text	Size text color in unexpanded instance, physical mode only

Prompt Line
These are the colors used in the prompt line and status line.

Text	Normal prompt line text
Prompt Text	Text color used for prompting
Highlight Text	Text color used for hypertext references
Cursor	Text cursor color
Background	Normal background color
Edit Background	Background color while editing

Plot Marks
These are the colors of the plot point marks used in electrical mode to indicate a node or current being plotted by WRspice. The default colors are the same as the trace colors used by WRspice for plotting.

The entries are: Plot Mark 1 to Plot Mark 18.

The rest of the panel consists of the stock GTK-2 color selection widgets. There are six up/down buttons which can adjust the red, green, and blue values, or the hue, saturation, and intensity values. To the left is a color wheel, with a triangle inside. One can drag the marked triangle vertex around the outer ring to set the color, and drag the small circle in the triangle to set the lightness. All widgets automatically track the current color setting.

There is also a palette containing several colors, and a rectangular color display area for the current and previous colors. Colors can be dragged between the palette locations and the current color location. The eye-dropper button allows setting the current color from a clicked-on screen object.

The Colors button brings up a listing of color names and RGB values. Clicking on a list entry will load that color into the color selector.

The Apply button must be pressed to actually transfer the new color to Xic. For layer colors, drag/drop of a color to the entries in the layer table or layer palette can be done as well. When changing layer colors, or screen attribute colors such as grid colors, the main window and similar (same display mode) sub-windows will be redrawn. The NoPhysRedraw variable, if set, will suppress automatic redraw of physical-mode windows.

When the Print Control Panel panel is visible, i.e., in hard copy mode, the colors set will be used in that mode only, and in the plots if the printer driver supports it.