Arrangement of Front Panel objects

[paris1_]

Hi...  I've done a lot of Front Panels over the years and admittedly I am not very good at knowing how to arrange objects on a Front Panel such that when you later build an executable out of your source code and deploy it onto a computer where the target monitor is a different size and resolution than the monitor on which you build the original code...  I know about the Window Size options in VI Properties (although I haven't yet used what appears to be new features in LabVIEW 2010) but quite honestly I've never been able to get those Window Size options to appear to work right???  My experience is up through LabVIEW 8.5 although I am now just starting to work in LabVIEW 2010...  I also use techniques such as grouping objects and so forth but the bottom line is I always end up with Executables with objects that overlap or are moved to places where I don't want them when I deploy my code onto other computers and monitors... 

Can anyone point me to some good tutorial or just explain to me potentially better techniques for building Front Panels that can be ported to other computers and monitors such that they will truly maintain the proportions and layouts on the target computer (in other words, so they look like they did when I built the code on the source computer)????  And are there anyy new tools for this in LabVIEW 2010???

And feedback or help would be much appreciated....  thanks... bob...

[stevem181]

Bob-

LabVIEW does many things well, but resizing Front Panels is not one of them. As you have probably found, different objects do not scale in a linear fashion.

The easiest solution is to make the Front Panel the right size for the lowest resolution screen that will be used whenever possible.

Also new monitors are probably cheaper than the expense of tweeking and testing the code at different resolutions. So encourage the customer to upgrade monitors to save them money.

Going from Win XP to Win 7 target machines can cause some issues too because default fonts are different. This can be dealt with by explicitly setting the fonts (in code or in the "ini" file) or by just leaving some extra room around text.

steve

[EvenDeejay]

I would recommend you to use Panes to split the front panel. See this video.

[paris1_]

I do appreciate the feedback...  thanks...  And I've never used Panes before...  Interesting...  I will give them a try... thanks...  bob...