This dialog is displayed when you select one or more boxes in a diagram and click the command on the Diagram menu - or choose from the dropdown menu that appears when you right-click on a box in a diagram. It is used to override any aspects of the appearance of the selected boxes. Ordinarily box appearance is determined by conditions and rules that are specified in the Boxes tab of Diagram Options. This dialog allows you to 'manually' override any aspect of this, for particular boxes. For example, suppose that using the Boxes tab of Diagram Options, and the Box Features Dialog, you had previously specified that you want all boxes for males to be blue and rectangular, with a dark brown shadow and you had also specified that you want all boxes for females to be pink, with rounded edges, and a light red shadow. Let us suppose that you want to override some aspects of this for particular selected boxes. To do that you don't open the Diagram Options dialog. Instead, you select the relevant boxes and click the command on the Diagram menu, to open the Override Box Features Dialog. Suppose that you want to override the box fill colour, but not the box shape. To do this, you tick 'Box Fill', but leave 'Box Shape' unticked. You choose the Box Fill colour you want (orange, let us say) and click . This kind of manual formatting always overrides any formatting specified in Diagram Options. So now, those boxes that you overrode will all have an orange fill colour. But as you didn't override either the shadow or the box shape, the males will still have a rectangular box with a dark brown shadow and the females will still have founded edge boxes, with a light red shadow. Of course you could also override these other features if you wanted to.
You can override the box features of as many boxes as you like,
simultaneously. To do this, simply select all the boxes (e.g.
using any of the techniques described in How to Select Multiple
Boxes in Diagrams) and click
on the Diagram menu. Whatever features you choose will be applied
to all the selected boxes.
This dialog is similar to the Box Features
Dialog which is used to associate box features with particular
conditions in the Diagram Options dialog.
| Box Fill | Background colour of boxes. Click on the colour button to specify the colour, or tick No Fill if you want the boxes to have no background (be transparent). |
|---|---|
| Box Line | This affects the frame of boxes (only). Specify the line thickness, its colour and solidity. |
| Box Shape | Choose between 5 different box shapes, or select <no box>
if you do not wish to have a box around text at all.
All box shapes except Rectangle and <no box> cut into the corner in some way. You can control the extent to which they do this by specifying the Corner Size. By increasing the Corner Size, for example, you can make a box with Rounded Corners appear oval. Where a box shape cuts into the corner of the box, any text in the box corners may overlap the cut off section of the corner to some extent, and hence itself be partially cut off. You can prevent this either by adjusting the Text Margins (see the Text Tab of the Diagram Options Dialog) or by specifying a Text Area Indent here. With all box shapes, a side and top indent of Half corner is enough on its own to prevent text from actually overlapping the cut off section of the corner (although with Text Margins of zero it might just touch the corner edge). Text Margins are applied at the current Text Area Indent. |
| Text Colour | If you choose an override text colour, be aware that whether or not this has any effect depends on the text scheme you use. You can specify for each item in a text scheme, whether or not the colour of the item text can be overridden as a box feature. Any item where the current does not have Allow Colour Override ticked, will not be affected. See the discussion of fonts in Create Simple Text Scheme for more on this. |
| Box Shadow | Choose <no shadow> to switch off shadows; or select the
position required if you want one. The normal position for a
shadow is Bottom-Right. As well as choosing all the other corners,
you can also choose Top and Bottom, Left and Right, and All
Around. The visual effect of these last 3 options is not really
that of a shadow, but it can be used anyway as another way to
emphasize particular boxes.
As well as specifying the shadow position, you an also specify its size and colour. |
| Picture | Choose this option if you want to override the picture options
set in the Picture tab of DIagram options. You can choose a
different preference picture for the selected boxes, or choose to
not display a picture at all. If you have chosen a
preference, you can also override the silhouette setting - which
applies if an Individual has no picture. You may wish to
force a silhouette to be shown instead of a picture, even though
the Individual has a picture. In that case, set 'Preference'
to 'none' and tick the silhouette option. Family Historian will only ever display a silhouette for Individuals that have a recorded sex, male or female. |
| Prevent Linking as Duplicate |
By default, Family Historian will link all duplicate boxes for
the same Individual, in a given diagram, using curved coloured
ribbons. You can prevent duplicate checking or prevent the
displayed of the ribbons, in Diagram Options (see in the General tab of Diagram Options, and
the button next to it).
But it may be that you don't want to remove these ribbons
altogether - you just want to unlink a few select boxes. You
can use this option to do that. |