Add vertical center for string indicators (and don't disable scrollbars on disabled indicators)

[Technico]

I have a rather large string indicator for displaying operator messages/alarms

and I would like to have the option for an automatic vertical center of the text,

so that all messages get displayed in the center of the screen (if too many lines, justify to top and display the scrollbar).

I also have a 2 line statusbar, but displaying a 1 line message that is not vertically centered, looks very strange.

The work-around I'm using now is to display the multiline string centered in a picturecontrol,

but I'm not a big fan of this fix because there are many boundary-conditions to keep in mind ...

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Another annoyance is that to prevent selection of text in the indicator I often disable the indicator

(it looks unprofessional if an indicatortext can be selected in the GUI),

but if the displayed text is larger than the string indicator, the scrollbar is also disabled !?!? 

and therefore not controllable by the user

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Speaking as a LV user, not as LV R&D:

Ability to easily have a text box stick to center: I'm fine with that. I've never had a use for it, but I've seen some UIs that have.

Leaving the scrollbar enabled but disallow selecting the text? Can you show me any UI where that's a good idea? If there's a scrollbar, it's almost always some long text, like a EULA or error log, and most times, I'd rather copy those out to some other reader. Far from looking unprofessional, allowing selection in those cases is something I see many apps change to enable over the years. LabVIEW has adjusted many of its dialog boxes to allow such selection of text. That second half of this idea seems like a bad idea to me.

But I'm throwing my Kudos on the idea for the first half.

[X.]

@AQ: The basic Dialog Box's string display is still not user selectable (let alone copy-able) as far as I can tell (LV 2016).

I reckon that not allowing users to copy whatever they want is bound to frustrate a few of them.

This being said, this Idea belongs to the endless series of suggestions to improve text formatting in LabVIEW... Solve them all or solve nothing?

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> @AQ: The basic Dialog Box's string display is still not user selectable (let alone copy-able) as far as I can tell (LV 2016).

This is correct. That is a system dialog and matches whatever the style is from the operating system.

[Corey.Rotunno]

So, 8 years later.....this would still be a great feature. 

[mikegimon]

Pretty disappointed in NI for not having a simple feature like this. Why is it so hard to vertically center text?

[wiebe@CARYA]

>Why is it so hard to vertically center text?

The current code base is probably just to old\cluttered to practically add features like this.

One of the reasons they started NXG, I assume (and hope). It is a bit sad to be graphically limited in so many ways while programming graphically...

[_carl]

Just came to the forum to make this request too (after encountering a need for this...)!

[1984]

14 years and 200 kudos after the submission of this idea its status is still "new".