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From: ebergman@isis.cs.du.edu (Eric Bergman-Terrell)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer
Subject: Standard Way to Specify Colors?
Message-ID: <1991May7.011322.12743@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
Date: 7 May 91 01:13:22 GMT
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Reply-To: ebergman@isis.cs.du.edu (Eric Bergman-Terrell)
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I am writing a graphical application - hence I am wondering how I should
let the user specify colors...  The program is an astronomy simulation/
graphing/simulation program.

I suppose I can set up one dialog box for specifying the appearance of
16 colors (i.e. by specifying their RGB values).  Then another dialog
box would associate the colors with various objects (i.e. sun is color 1,
stars are color 15, etc).

However, is there a built-in way to do this (I'm dreading writing the code -
which I expect won't be too bad).  For example, the "colors" option of the
control panel lets the user specify some colors, but I cannot find any
routines to access those colors (I have Petzold, Guide to Programming, &
Programmer's Reference).  Let me know if you know of some routines that
can get the RGB values of those colors...

Another option that I'm entertaining is to give the users 16 colors that
can't be changed.  Is this feasible?  I'm wondering if RGB(x, y, z) might
be attractive on a VGA card, but unattractive or even invisible on a different
(color) graphics card...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading your suggestions!


Terrell