Icon Editor Templates

[RavensFan]

Have there been any changes between LabVIEW 2012 and 2014 in the way the Icon Editor handles the templates?

I opened a file in LabVIEW 2012 and started modifying the icon from the default.  I picked the _box template and worked from there.  It is a black outline with a white background.

Later, I was doing the same thing to another file in LabVIEW 2014.  I picked the same _box template.  It looked like a black icon with a transparent background once I got to the Layers page.

I thought maybe I had different version of icon templates, until I realized both LabVIEW version point to the My Documents\LabVIEW Data\Icon Templates folder.  The _box is a .png file in VI\Frameworks subfolder.  So I'd expect it to look the same in both LabVIEW versions.

Or is it somehow related to the .bin file?

However, working with the box with transparent background in LV14, it at least seems to treat the background as white when I place it on other block diagrams.  I'm not seeing wires show through transparent areas.  So everything is just fine.

I just can't figure out why the icon template looks different in LV12 versus LV14.

See the attached .png file to see what I'm talking about.

[Jacobson-ni]

Interesting problem, I will add that this happened to me with fresh LabVIEW installs and the change seemed to occur between LabVIEW 2013 SP1 and LabVIEW 2014

I also played around with the transparency and it seems that the transparency will be kept only if it is not within the borders of filled in areas.  I made some weird shapes to show what I mean.

Here is the Icon Editor for the VI I made

And here is what it looke like in another VI.  I changed the background color to show transparency.

So ya, no answers here but that sure is interesting.  I'll see if I can ask someone who might know more tomorrow

[RavensFan]

Thanks for looking into this.  I do remember something about the icon's border defining the area.  I've played with smaller borders before.  I don't think I've ever tried an icon with multiple borders before.

It just surprised me when the same template appeared differently in LV 2014 vs. 2012.   In the end it all seems to work correctly once the icon is saved and how the subVI appears in the other VI's.  But something must have changed within the way the icon editor works with the template .png.  It is just a question of whether this was intended in order to fix something else, or did something else change and this effect on the icon editor was unintentional.

[Jacobson-ni]

RavensFan,

As I mentioned previously, the change seemed to happen between 2013 SP1 and 2014 so I looked into the 2014 bug fixes listed in the Readme and found the following.  

286661

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Issue with the LabVIEW Icon Editor opening with a white background when it should be transparent

I don't think this is the byproduct of another change, it reads very much like it should have been transparent from the start.  All in all, I would say that the change is documented in the Readme and it was intentional.

One other interesting thing is that the behavior of LabVIEW 2009 seems to be right in the middle.  If you open the IE it is transparent but when you use a template it looks like the 2012 version.

[RavensFan]

Thanks Matt,

I'm going to mark your answer as the solution since it answered my question about whether something had changed.

I guess I do have one question left.  The _box.png file, does it have a black box on a transparent background?  Or a black box on a white background?  I don't know of an easy way to figure that out without installing GIMP and looking into it.  Does it matter either way?

[Jacobson-ni]

I don't think it would end up making a difference whether the file iteself is a border on white or transparent.  I don't know if there is an easy way to check either I brought the .png into Powerpoint which I thought perserved transparencies and it was a black border on white.  Again, not the best approach but I don't know an easy way to check.

After you started this thread, I noticed for the first time that the start asynch. call actually has a transparent background.  I figured this would be transparent in 2014 and not in 2012 as we found with the icon editor but it turns out that the function is transparent in every version of LabVIEW I tried (12, 13, 14).

[JÞB]

The template layers changed 2013as I recall to better support class and project defaults.