How can I make a indicator transparent grey?

[Ben]

I only know of two ways to get that look in LabVIEW and neither of them are going to be of much use but I'll share them anyway.

1) It is possible to set the transparency level of a FP. If you had a FP with only one control and it was set as a floater AND its FP was set to partail trancparency, you could get that look.

2) I have taken a VI that was running in a sub-panel and removed it from the sub-Panel and forced it FP to be visable. At teh same time, I hid the sub-panel, showed a picture that had an image that was of the FP that I prcessed to partially "grey-out" the iamge and then over-layed that with text indicating the Fp was now floating.

Both of these techinque are probaly way too much work just to achieve the garphic effect you are asking for.

Ben

[Mythilt]

One other possibility is use a picture as a control.

Basically create a pict control that is as large as your total area, then overlay draw the 'controls' that you need ontop of the picture using the draw commands.  (Draw Greyed out Rectangle.vi for instance).  Then using Events just detect where and when the mouse button is pressed on your main picture, if it is in the 'control' zone, react accordingly.

This is a fair amount of work though.

Yeap, I just did a quick test.  Take a picture control, make its background and border transparent.  Then use the draw commands to create the effect you are looking for.

Message Edited by Mythilt on 10-08-2008 01:20 PM

[marc france]

Hi Ben and Mythilt,

As you were both saying your solutions are kind of complicated for what I am willing to do. I was just looking for a very simple tool like in word. Nevermind, but thank you very much for taking some of your time to think and make up these ideas. I hope they will be usefull for others.

Best regards,

Marc

[Mythilt]

No problem.

I do agree that having an alpha-channel value on the FP/controls would be a nice addition.

[Yddet]

The topic is very old but it is the first result on google for "labview translucent string indicator" so I would like to bring a solution for the next people searching for a translucent indicator. 

I work on LabVIEW 2018 32bits

You should customize an indicator and make it all transparent with the tools palette. Then right click on the indicator and "import at same size" a translucent png.

To create this translucent png, use a third party software (I use Gimp for the following instructions), create a new transparent image, add a layer with a color and opacity of you choice and save it.

In attachment is a white image with 75% opacity

Yddet

[Yamaeda]

It's binary in LV, either transparant or not, no translucency.

I don't know if you can use a picture as background, in that case you could use a simple dithering chess board pattern with grey/transparant to achieve a similar effect.

And/or, if you can use a picture as background you can extract the picture behind and tone it down yourself and use as background ...

/Y

[Yddet]

Yamaeda,

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And/or, if you can use a picture as background you can extract the picture behind and tone it down yourself and use as background ...

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That is what I did except I simply replaced the background of the indicator with a new .png without extracting anything.

LabVIEW can't create translucency but can display a .png with the right proprieties. See exemple :

Yddet

[wiebe@CARYA]

The irony of a graphical programming language without decent graphical capabilities...

Dotted\dashed lines? Rotated text (controls\indicators)? Transparency? ☹️

Sad to say, NXG is our only hope on improvement.

[zou]

Import a translucent image works just fine.  I've been using this trick for years.

As long as all the pixels have the same color, raster image works.

Raster image with gradient color/gradient translucent also works.

NO need to switch to NXG.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@zou wrote:

Import a translucent image works just fine.  I've been using this trick for years.

As long as all the pixels have the same color, raster image works.

Raster image with gradient color/gradient translucent also works.

NO need to switch to NXG.

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Transparency is underdeveloped though.

For instance, a png loaded into a picture control doesn't support transparency.

Of course NXG didn't have a picture control at all (last time I checked). But at least there's higher a change features will be added at some point.