Darren's Weekly Nugget 02/01/2010

[Darren]

It can sometimes be difficult to deal with the formatting of strings on the front panels of user interface VIs.  One problem in particular I've often had is bolding certain text in user-visible strings.  One handy solution is to use [LabVIEW]\vi.lib\utility\error.llb\Bold Particular String.vi in the following manner:

As you can see, any string contained in <b></b> tags will become bolded in the display string.  This solution is much easier than having to find the correct character indices yourself.

[Darin.K]

Is this an official recommendation to use a VI in vi.lib that is not in the palettes?  Should we beware that this may become private at some point and maintain a personal copy?  Or, will this one be "promoted" now that the cat is out of the bag?

[Darren]

I've written other nuggets over the years that promote VIs that aren't in the palettes, like this one and this one.  Instead of repeating here my feelings on the utilization of non-palette VIs in vi.lib, I'll instead direct you to read my response in this thread.

[Darin.K]

That response (and thread) is actually the source of my question, not the answer, and I believe your other nuggets predate that post (or at least my reading of it).  My question was simply, in light of the issue, is it still reasonable to use the non-pallete VIs directly, or should we get into the habit of making and using personal copies?  They seem to be on somebody's radar screen now, which may not have always been the case.  I was hoping that I could read into your continued endorsement that no major surprises are lurking.

[Darren]

My personal feeling is that you should use the vi.lib VIs as they are, under the looking-forward and looking-backward assumptions I made in the aforementioned thread.

[K1200LT_rider]

Maybe someone could take this idea a step further and put together a VI that will parse out all the available font attributes (bold, underline, italic, strikeout, etc.).  I think that would be an excellent addition to the OpenG String category of VIs so everyone would have universal access to it.

[craigc]

Thanks Darren,

Have also thought about doing something similar but in reverse for linking out of string indicator.  i.e put "refer to the error document for details"in a string indicator which would allow the user to fire off an event which would ultimately take them to some documentation or website even.  Might be able to do a similar thing from this.

Craig

[Hooovahh]

I found this which does what you said (saved in 8.5).  Unfortunatly I can't find where it was originally posted (I believe it to be in these forums somewhere) but I don't have the name of the original uploader, or even the name of the original archive.  The example works, but one thing is it is picky about having <B> instead of <b> and <SIZE> instead of <size>, which is easily fixable.

[TCPlomp]

Funny, the VIs in the error tools are case ignorant (both <B> and <b> work), however when using the VI description, only <B> works.

Ton

[DFGray]

You can use <b> and it will work in VI descriptions from at least LabVIEW 8.2 and up.  I know it does not work for 7.1 and I don't have 8.0 on my machine to test.