Is there a way to remove (or just not show) the box drawn on top of a cluster datatype viewed as icon?

[TimBlaisdell]

Yes, I realize this is a minor annoyance, but it IS annoying.

When you view a cluster datatype as an icon, you see something like this:

The icon looks like this (screenshot from the icon editor):

So if you look closely, what's happening is that LabVIEW is drawing a pink rectangle around my icon, obscuring the top and bottom rows, and left and right columns of my icon.

In addition, for some reason it draws a little tag thingy (I think it's supposed to represent a cluster) at the bottom, obscuring most of the bottom 5 rows of my icon -- where the text is.

Effectively, what this means is that instead of having a 32x32 icon to play with, I can only show a 30x25 icon.

The icons are small enough as it is, and making them meaningful and descriptive is a chore at 32x32.  

Is there some configuration option that will remove this box around my icons?  Or at least it should draw the box AROUND the icon, not obscuring the outer edges of it!

[raphschru]

Hi Tim,

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@TimBlaisdell  a écrit :

Is there some configuration option that will remove this box around my icons?

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I don't think there exist such option.

However, it is usually a bad practice to draw borderless icons, even for controls.

The recommended way (at least to VI Analyzer standards) would be:

Layers:

Text:

Resulting in this:

(You can of course customize the library banner and use your desired colors)

Here I put a space in the 3rd line to move the text up a little.

Regards,

Raphaël.

[paul_a_cardinale]

Another reason not to use text in an icon.

[TimBlaisdell]

I don't understand why you say "it's bad practice to use borderless icons".

Having a 1-pixel border around an icon wastes more than 10% of your icon.

It's not just the border.  Having a 1-pixel border generally means you can't use the pixels adjacent to the border, because whatever you put there will blend with the border, like below:

Notice how much easier to read this is:

So, you have to burn the pixels just inside the border for legibility.

I'm not trying to make a big deal of this.  I'm just trying to figure out what other people do. 

In my opinion, this is the best option:

In addition to just being clearer, it gives you more space to put other things, like little icons and such.

If I'm wrong, please tell me why.  I'm genuinely curious.

[TimBlaisdell]

Wow.  No text on icons?  What do you do then?  Do you just make all icons in a library identical?  Do you have to figure out a clever set of tiny glyphs to put on every icon to indicate what it does?  And then months or years later remember what those glyphs were supposed to mean?

What can be more clear than text for indicating what a VI does?

[Kyle97330]

I believe the "Borders around all icons" argument is mostly for subVIs.  Those get placed on block diagrams bare, and many people will color-code their diagram backgrounds for any number of reasons.  For instance, I sometimes put a pale green on the background of "everything is going OK" cases and pale red on the background of "there is a problem" cases, similar to the color you see around the Error/No Error cases of a case structure using an error wire as an input.  I've known other people who use other schemes.  But nobody uses pure black as a diagram background, so a black border around everything makes it very clear where the borders are no matter the conditions.

The "no text" argument is a bit weaker.  I believe the one of the original goals of LabVIEW was to be language-independent.  If you look at all the functions included in LabVIEW, nearly all of them are icon-based, which means they should be equally understandable by people who speak English, French, Mandarin, Korean, and so on.  So if you're making a package of VIs for potential global distribution, it could make sense.  But if you're just making VIs for internal use inside your monolingual company, you don't have time to carefully create a micro-icon for each of 1,000 subVIs in your megaprojects; you just abbreviate the file name and put that in as text.

[paul_a_cardinale]

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@TimBlaisdell wrote:

Wow.  No text on icons?  What do you do then?  Do you just make all icons in a library identical?

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Yes, absolutely!  As you so astutely pointed out, there are only 2 possible options:

1. Tiny test in each icon.
2. Every icon identical.

[TimBlaisdell]

I'm all for colored backgrounds on the block diagram.  Green for good, red for error, etc.  However I have a standard: no background colors on the block diagram with RGB values below 240.  This solves the problem where people make background colors that completely hide the WIRES.  IMO that's the main problem, not hiding icons.

[TimBlaisdell]

Haha... I think...

(replying to paul_a_cardinale)

[paul_a_cardinale]

I hate looking at a BD with a bunch of white boxes containing tiny text.

If you must have text, just make the label visible.  There's also context help.

Besides, it's not that hard to make decent icons.