Re: Motivation for having a 'text color' that is invisible

["Michael Ross" <michael e ross gmail com>]

In the DAQ development system I use called LabVIEW they provide a color they call "transparent."  It is indeed a useful color.  

Even better would be a slider for color transparency and for layer transparency.  I often wish the fill of a shape could be transparent -- if it seems really important then I crank up Inkscape.  But that would never be as good as having the ability native to Dia.

It is still a good idea to toggle the visibility of text in a shape.  A hidden or temporarily invisible note could also double as a documentation field for a particular instance of a shape.

Mike

On 10/25/07, Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk> wrote:

On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 10:43 +0530, Sameer Sahasrabuddhe wrote:
> On 10/25/07, christian ridderstrom gmail com
> < christian ridderstrom gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > > So the exact issue is that the text displayed by the time scale should
> > > be optional. A tick-box in the properties to toggle text should be very
> > > useful. One could even consider a tick-box to toggle the minor time
> > > step.
> >
> > This would certainly solve the "issue" for this particular shape. However,
> > I suspect there are other shapes where it might also be useful to be able
> > to hide the text. So instead of fixing all the likely shapes, and possibly
> > adding a lot of check tick-boxes, this might be a more general solution.
>
> I would vote for correctness than ease of coding. If it takes some
> effort to go look at every object, then so be it. What you really want
> is that displaying some built-in text on some objects should be
> optional, then that is what it should be. Making it invisible obscures
> the intention. Who knows, when someone gets around to coding this,
> they might notice an abstraction that helps in ways not currently
> foreseen.

Well, if text could be made invisible, then why not other things?  It
could make sense to have an "invisible" color -- any renderer can handle
that simply be not rendering the thing in question.  That way we provide
much more than by having an extra option to turn any text field on/off.

-Lars


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Michael Ross
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