Topic: Change crosshair color when switched to paperspace

[bman]

How would i go about creating a reactor that would change the crosshairs to red everytime you're in paperspace & switch it back to white when in modelspace or tilemode 1?...or switch the background color from black to grey?

[Kerry]

You can use the AcadPreferencesDisplay Object Properties.

explicitly
(vla-put-GraphicsWinLayoutBackgrndColor ...
(vla-put-LayoutCrosshairColor ...

  etc, etc,

A thought though.Are you aware these can be set from
 Options-> Display->Colors....

set and forget, and save the reactor processing ?

[bman]

yeah i'm aware of the
Options-> Display->Colors....
The only problem is that the colors don't change when you're in pspace vs. mspace. I have two people that recently switched to using paperspace & they're continously drawing half of the entities in pspace & the other half in model. I figured if i could get the crosshairs to change to red when in paperspace that would throw up a red flag for them to switch to mspace. What's the best way to achieve this....using reactors???

[Kerry]

yeah i'm aware of the
Options-> Display->Colors....
The only problem is that the colors don't change when you're in pspace vs. mspace. I have two people that recently switched to using paperspace & they're continously drawing half of the entities in pspace & the other half in model. I figured if i could get the crosshairs to change to red when in paperspace that would throw up a red flag for them to switch to mspace. What's the best way to achieve this....using reactors???

funny, mine does.

and if they switch from paperspace to modelspace when in a layout, the X-Y Icon displays in the work area.

I would have another look before you start to think about adding reactors/event handling.

[Dommy2Hotty]

I figured if i could get the crosshairs to change to red when in paperspace that would throw up a red flag for them to switch to mspace.

Wouldn't the bright white screen throw up a "red flag?"

[hendie]

Wouldn't the bright white screen throw up a "red flag?"

that's just what I was thinking  

[daron]

It would if you left it as a bright white screen. Then again even if you do, it doesn't let the user know whether or not he's in a viewport or not. I do the same thing, where in the model tab, my crosshairs are green and when in any of the layout tabs, my crosshairs are red. If I should activate any of the viewports, the color of the crosshair is still red. What bman is looking for is the crosshairs to be changed to the model tab color while in a viewport through a layout tab. I kind of like the idea he's coming up with. As far as further development goes, it would be good if the crosshairs were changed to a color based on if the current viewport were locked or unlocked.

[bman]

I've changed the crosshairs under
Options>Display>Color>Layout Tabs Pointer to red.
When in tilemode 0, I switch back & forth between between pspace & mspace the crosshairs stay red. When in tilemode 0, I was thinking that if the crosshairs changed colors when switching from vport modelspace to pspace then hopefully that would turn on a light bulb.

The problem is that others here turn on all the layers & switch to tilemode 0 & freeze layers in the current vport & edit the plan sheets in each individual vport. I keep getting interupted quite often on a daily basis due to "Lost in Paperspace". I use scripts & layer manager to manipulate plans & switch to pspace to just plot the dwg so i don't have this problem.

I know some sort of standards would fix this problem but no one here is willing to enforce them. We have ten different people doing things ten different ways.

[daron]

bman, I feel your pain. We're going through similar problems here. Yours is far worse though. As far as your last post, I believe I do understand the line of thought you're after. I'll try to look into it using what Kerry offered up.

[bman]

It would help those who do their editing within the viewports if the crosshairs changed colors when switching from mspace to pspace so that things don't get unintentionally placed in pspace.

[daron]

I do understand as I have the same issues occasionally.

[bman]

Thanks Daron.
Any help is greatly appreciated!

[JohnK]

Kerry gave it to ya already. Didnt he? He told you some of the key functions to use. (Thats prety much it, after that is just misc "setup" code.)

[bman]

Looks Greek to me as i am not familiar with creating reactors.

[daron]

Well, here's the start, but as you'll notice I had to change the value of the variant for the color code. For some reason it outputs as a 19 variant value, which doesn't seem to exist. Now, the value in the variant is, on my cpu, 65280?!? Anybody know how to make color sense of that?

Code: [Select]

(setq $acad (vlax-get-acad-object)
      $doc  (vla-get-activedocument $acad)
      )
(setq acpref (vla-get-preferences $acad)
      acdisp (vla-get-display acpref)
      aclcco (vlax-variant-change-type (vla-get-LayoutCrosshairColor acdisp) 5)
      )