Colours

[gracehjs]

I am working on the items that would use a colour picker and I need some help. First of all I need to know what the following items do.
Registry Entry
GuidesLayerGreen - value 0
GuidesLayerBlue - value 0
GuidesLayerRed - value 255


StripeColor - value 16382457 (0x00f9f9f9)
DeactivationColor - value 10263708 (0x009c9c9c)
SelectionColor - value 8240895 (0x007dbeff)

Secondly has anyone any idea what these values mean? The first value is what I see being returned from the registry. If I take them and convert them to HEX. that does not work as the first to digits show as 00 which is the Alpha channel and makes things transparent.
Thanks

[mwenz]

Those are rgb values. So the 0 0 for the first two simply mean no green, no blue. The 255 for red is as red as it can be using the 0 to 255 value range. Change the two zeros to a number above zero and the red will become darker, change all of them to 255 and the guidelines will be rgb black.

Create a rectangle. Pull up the color editor and set it to rgb. Play with the three values. That would be the effect on the guideline colors if set identically.

[Acorn]

Change the two zeros to a number above zero and the red will become darker, change all of them to 255 and the guidelines will be rgb black.

Should 255,255,255 not be white and 0,0,0 black?
Acorn

[mwenz]

Heh, heh. Yep. Got it a little backwards, eh? Well, having white guides would be interesting...

[mwenz]

Oh. And one other thing.

If, like me, you have the Units in the Options dialog for Xara products set to percentage, it is weird to play with RGB (now, when the heck is Xara gonna fix that business?). So one may need to change units to the 255 scale.

[Acorn]

StripeColor - value 16382457 (0x00f9f9f9)
DeactivationColor - value 10263708 (0x009c9c9c)
SelectionColor - value 8240895 (0x007dbeff)

For these I would assume you have transparency and the RGB values.
The 0x prefix is saying the following characters are hexadecimal.
So the StripeColor is a very light grey; DeactivationColor is a darker grey and SelectionColor is a sky blue.

Acorn

[gracehjs]

Yes but according to Wikipedia
RGBA stands for red green blue alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually simply a use of the RGB color model, with extra information. The color is RGB, and may belong to any RGB color space, but an integral alpha value as invented by Catmull and Smith between 1971 and 1972 enables alpha compositing. The inventors named alpha after the Greek letter in the classic linear interpolation formula αA + (1-α)B.

The alpha channel is normally used as an opacity channel. If a pixel has a value of 0% in its alpha channel, it is fully transparent (and, thus, invisible), whereas a value of 100% in the alpha channel gives a fully opaque pixel (traditional digital images). Values between 0% and 100% make it possible for pixels to show through a background like a glass (translucency), an effect not possible with simple binary (transparent or opaque) transparency. It allows easy image compositing.

And that is what I am seeing in the picker completely transparent , so how do I interpret the values?

[gracehjs]

OK, after thinking about it I replaced the first 2 zeroes with FF and I then get colors. I would still like to know what the options mean so I can test.

Thanks

[handrawn]

Hi Grace

'SelectionColor' is the color the bar in the pageandlayer gallery displays for selected item[s] [edit - ie items shown as selected in the gallery so it includes 'page' and 'layer' entries as and when selected not just items selected on the workspace]

'DeactivationColour' is the color the text in the gallery turns for an item that is locked and/or hidden

'StripeColor' is the color given to every alternative entry in the gallery, opposing to the background color [which default is white] so as to make the entries easier to determinate [see/count/whatever] [edit - this is of course overidden by selection color as appropriate]

[gracehjs]

Thanks Handrawn.