Transparent Color on Dialog images

[Gareth Owen]

How is the transparent color determined for dialog images?

I have started making use of these to make laying out easier, but there does not seem to be a way of setting the transparent color.

An example is the image on the left hand side of the Swoosh dialog theme, when I set this to transparent, all the blue disapears.

I was wanting to loose the white.

Cheers

Gareth

[MichaelNesmith]

Hi Gareth

The transparent color for an image is the color of the bottom right pixel in that image.

Be sure to test your transparent images under a variety of different Windows themes and color schemes - sometimes its better to use a fixed background color in your dialogs and images without transparency because certain color schemes have unexpected dialog surface colors which can hurt the look of your dialogs.

[stevew]

hi. i have found that if images are of type ico then the regular transparancy features of adobe photoshop work.

I have attached an example of of a new picture for the top left of the alpha theme. This eliminates the white dots that appear on the original image.

File Attached:

ico_BoxTopLeft256.ico

[Gareth Owen]

Thanks, managed to get it working,

One other question,

The radio buttons seem to have a small backgroud area, a square just arround the button itself, the text is fully transparent.

Is there a way to
a) remove this small area of background
b) change the buttons to be square.

[MichaelNesmith]

Hi Gareth

Setting the Color property of a radio button to the background color on the form should take care of this. If your background is "colorful", I mean, it has a pattern requiring full transparency of that region...sorry to say but I am not sure if that is possible. You can try experimenting with the Transparent and TransparentColor properties of the radio buttons, but I believe that small square region will remain, and this is why pre-built themes place radio buttons on solid backgrounds.

I'm not sure what you mean by changing the buttons to be square - perhaps if you use checkboxes this answers your question?

[Gareth Owen]

Square button would cover the square non-transparent region

Is there a way of specifying ANY color for the background, we are using a pale blue color, got from other corporate images, this does not appear in the standard options

[MichaelNesmith]

Yes, the Color field! You can enter any color directly here using the form $XXYYZZ. You can therefore solve your problem by entering the color code for your corporate pale blue here. If you open dialogs in pre-built InstallAware themes you will see many of them specify a color code for the radio button backgrounds in this way (just open the licenseradio dialogs found in most themes for an example).

About determining the exact color code for this field...its very similar to the color code used by HTML. If the HTML color code is

#AABBCC

then the InstallAware Color code will be

$CCBBAA

So the first two and the last two digits are swapped, the center digits remain the same. Most image processing programs have "droppers" which let you "pick" an exact color from an existing image, and then you can inspect the color code for this exact color in a variety of different representations, including HTML.

[Gareth Owen]

Ah, thanks, that works fine, I really must learn to double click things a little more