Progress
AppBuilder
Developer’s Guide


Choosing Colors

To set the foreground and background data colors for an object, follow these steps:

  1. Select the object and choose Tools Color, or open the property sheet and choose the Colors button (the crayons). The Color Selector dialog box opens:
  2. Sixteen colors remains the baseline standard under MS-Windows, and those colors occupy slots 0 through 15 in the Progress color table. The boxes labeled with the standard Progress symbol for the unknown value (undefined state)—the question mark (?)—represent the default colors for the object. The default colors are those assigned by the object's parent, but are most often the colors shown in the example: black (slot 0) foreground and light gray (slot 8) background.

  3. Click on a new color for the desired context. If you wish to use a color not in the default set, see the "Defining New Colors" section.
  4. If the object whose colors you are changing must be readable (text, instrumentation, graphs, etc.), verify that you have chosen a good combination by examining the text in the Sample rectangle.
  5. Text is always less readable on a monitor than on paper, so it is good practice to change your design choices rather than compromise readability. While good contrast is the most important factor over which you have some control, other factors also come into play, including font size and style. There are also other factors in play over which you as the programmer have no control—the characteristics of the eventual user's monitor being the most important. For this reason, you should choose the most highly readable combinations whenever possible.


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