This dialog box is opened by clicking in the Boxes tab of the Diagram Options Dialog. The
purpose of the dialog in this case, is to allow you to associate some
features with a particular condition.
The appearance of this dialog varies slightly if the features you are viewing are the 'Default Features' associated with the Default condition. With the Default condition only, there is no option to not tick Box Fill, Box Line, Box Shape or Box Shadow.
With all other conditions, you choose which features are to be affected by the condition, and in what way. For example suppose your condition is the Male sex condition. Let us say that you tick the Box Fill box, and then tick No Fill to indicate that you want the box to be transparent (no background). This means that male boxes will have a transparent background (unless this condition is overridden by another condition with higher priority). This is quite different from simply not ticking the Box Fill box. If you had done that, this would have meant that the box background is not to be determined by whether or not the box owner is Male; it is to be determined by some other condition (the Default condition if none other).
This dialog is similar to the Override Box Features Dialog which is used to manually override any aspect of the appearance of one or more selected boxes in a diagram.
| 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 to specify a text colour as a box feature, 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 scheme 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 can also specify its size and colour. |
| Icon |
Catalogues for hotels, or bed-and-breakfast accommodation, sometimes use little icons to show what features are included with the room. For example, a little TV icon might be used to show that the room has a TV. You can use similar icons with boxes in Family Historian diagrams. For example, you might have a ‘Work-in- Progress’ Record Flag that you set for records that you are currently working on. You could specify that you wished to show a ‘Men at Work’ icon below boxes where this record flag is set. Or you could have a record flag for Sailors and use a Ship icon to mark them in diagrams. Click the button to choose from a number of pre-installed icons. It is possible to create and use your own icons if you wish, although this is not recommended as custom icons are usually bitmaps, and these do not scale well. If you want to do it, anyway, you will need to use another program to create the images. You can, for example, use the Paint accessory program that comes with all versions of Windows. If you use this program to create your own icons, save your image in bitmap (.bmp) format. Whatever colour appears in the top-left hand corner of the bitmap will be interpreted by Family Historian as transparent. So, for example, if the top-left corner is white, every white pixel in your bitmap will appear to be transparent when the icon is displayed in a diagram. You will need to save the icon in a sub-folder of the 'Icon's folder, in the Program Data area for Family Historian. On most installations this is located at C:\ProgramData\Calico Pie\Family Historian\Icons. When you select a custom icon that is in bitmap format, a field appears, Size, that allows you to specify the dots-per-inch value to use for bitmap images (this is not needed or possible for pre-installed icons). When you increase the number of dots per inch, you effectively make the icon appear smaller when displayed in a diagram. Conversely, if you reduce the dpi the icons will get bigger, The default is 250 dpi. The minimum size value is 50 dpi. |