Symbol design

[Gammatech]

I want to put the company logo on to various pages. I have tried to use a symbol component by copying a scanned image of the logo and double clicking into the symbol component. This puts the logo into the symbol but the size and location controls do not seem to size or position it within the symbol. I've tried manipulating the image in Open Office Draw and then copying it into the symbol but although a cropped image has its origin set in the top left corner the logo size does not alter with component size. The image of the logo was saved as .bmp. What am I doing wrong?

Martin

[BeeHay]

I believe you want to use the Symbol Factory to add your new symbol.

It's the little half green circle with a white bow tie looking thing at the top of DF.

From there you can add your own categories and add your custom symbols to that category.

From there you can copy the symbol, then paste it into DF, and then manipulate it.

[AzeoTech]

Two things going on here. First, DF does not scale bitmaps, only vector images (most of symbol factory). You can't really make a bitmap into a vector image, so you are going to have to presize your logos outside DF before pasting them.

Second, some drawing applications, for some reason when copying to the clipboard, copy bitmaps both as bitmaps and WMF format (vector). The vector format, though is just a single vector command telling it to place a bitmap, so is completely useless. However, it does throw DF's rendering and causes the bitmap to be stuck at the top left corner. To avoid this, always bring bitmaps through Microsoft paint. Just open it in paint, Copy, then Paste into DAQFactory. You do not need to create the symbol control first. Just doing Paste from the DF right click menu on a page will create the symbol control for you with your image.

[Gammatech]

Thanks, I,ll try that

[AndyT]

I am new to DAQFactory and using a LABJack U12 with the bundled Express version. Landed on this topic when searching for how to draw symbols. Found some pointers in this forum and then explored.

Well I am having success using OpenOffice Draw v3.1.1 and drawing simple symbols with circles, triangles etc and then just selecting one in draw, Ctrl+C to copy to clipboard, and then in DAQFactory Symbol property pages just do the "double click" in the symbol cell.

With circles or elipses drawn in OO Draw they imported as just octagons (as they did when exported to .wmf and opened in Windows Paint). However if you first right click on the elipse object in Draw and then select Convert/Polygon it changes it to a 64 sided polygon that imports into DAQFactory just fine.

Now to see if I can get symbols to re-size (scale) under control of a channel value.

Andy

[AndyT]

Further to last post:

Yes works fine with Size (but symbols locate at top left hand corner so had to do an expression in the location tab to keep my changing size of circle centred.

e.g.

Size=Abs(ch1(0))*100

Location= 50-Abs(ch1(0))*100/2

worked for me and using Test for my input gave a dynamic resize of a circle in my case.

When trying out rotate with a triangle it also changed size as the 3 corners snap to the edge of the box. Not what I wanted so I put a circle around the triangle and this fixed it. Then make the circle background color so not to see it. Kept the triangle in shape.

Good fun but I may upgrade to a version with the symbol library. Pity Express did not just include a few of the 3600 or so you get with higher versions.

[AzeoTech]

You get the octogon because your drawing program is using polylines instead of a circle command when making the metafile.

That is a creative way of resolving the rotating issue!

You can actually get access to a couple symbols to play with by downloading a DAQFactory trial.