annoying indicator blink

[ahunter]

The OS is Win7 64bit.

OS Language: Chinese

Blinks also happens in case of "17pt Tahoma" .

[altenbach]

I suspect it has to do with your Chinese OS Language. Sorry, I cannot test.

[ahunter]

Thanks a lot.

I will continue the test.

[ahunter]

I had tested the code on WIN7 (English). The problem is there too.

And I also find somebody encounterd the same thing at LAVAG.

The LAVAG post named "How to stop LabVIEW indicator from flickering?"

Here is the link.

I believe this should be one "small" bug existed among versions of LabVIEW.  

😞  

[RavensFan]

According to the lava posts, the person found it to be a problem with the display driver.  Though they solved it be completely creating their own indicator out of a picture indicator.  No indication if they ever found a fix to the display driver itself.

[ahunter]

Windows run on hardware banded ThinkPad, Dell and Acer was used to carry out my test.

They all come to the same result.

I have to admit the blink is not that obvious when compared with the built-in "blink" feature.

"Flickering" may be more suitable than "blink" to describe the behaviour, or a mixture of the two words.

May somebody post his/her test result.

[johnsold]

I ran the VI from message 6 of this thread on my Mac with LV 2014 (after replace the false constant with a stop button).  I tried it with modern, system and silver indicators and various wait times including zero. No flickering.

Lynn

[mullenr]

I ran the code on my 8.5 Labview and on 2011. It blinks (flickers) in both. Only the Y text blinks. The X is rock solid. I put in several duplicate indicators and moved them around, as to how they were connected to the Format To String vi. A different one blinked as I made the connections to the vi in different order.

This has been a recurring problem in my Labview programs. Definately a Labview issue. I'll take the hint and try different fonts. (The tested font is Arial 20pt)  I'll keep looking for a solution though.

[mullenr]

Ahh, should have looked more into this before. I checked the text indicator's property to 'Limit to a Single Line'. This took care of the flicker in my program and in the test case provided. (And also may explain why no one else could see the problem?) Doesn't explain exactly what's happening though.

Maybe the somewhat rude NI guy could explain what's happening. (I almost always use the abort button when doing short tests...) Though, fixed for my purposes!

[billko]

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@mullenr wrote:

Ahh, should have looked more into this before. I checked the text indicator's property to 'Limit to a Single Line'. This took care of the flicker in my program and in the test case provided. (And also may explain why no one else could see the problem?) Doesn't explain exactly what's happening though.

Maybe the somewhat rude NI guy could explain what's happening. (I almost always use the abort button when doing short tests...) Though, fixed for my purposes!

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Actually, it explains EXACTLY what is happening.  Your text takes more than one line to display.  When set to single line, it is no longer trying to scroll the indicator window - hence, no blinking.  I suspect the reason why it wasn't happening on anyone else's computer is because of the language setting.  I suspect something to do with double-byte characters.  Maybe when translated to a single-byte character set, it all fits into one line.  (We're talking just a few pixels here.)

To test this, resize the indicator so it is a lot longer and has room for multiple lines, three to be safe (just in case the font is also too tall).  In other words, "much too big".  Now it shoudln't flicker even when set to multiple lines.