2d label improvements

[meng@…]

1) Most important feature to make 2d labels more usable is a mouse mode to position the labels.
2) Currently no frames option to fade in/out move labels.
3) Might have option to allow label size to scale with window width.
4) Might have option to center label at specified x,y.
5) Labels can only be a single color. Also a limitation of Chimera 1.

[Tom Goddard]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Elaine Meng
Subject: Re: movie labels
Date: April 13, 2017 at 12:27:35 PM PDT
To: Tom Goddard

Yes, those are the 3 issues, and #3 is also a limitation of Chimera1. It wouldn’t be as annoying if there were a GUI / mouse mode. With commands it was a painful iteration to correctly space the differently colored parts horizontally when I decided to change the size of the overall label. Also without the convenient symbols menu (in Chimera1 2D labels gui), I had to look up the unicode for symbols alpha and beta.

I guess another cool thing would be something that would center a label in the window (in X, say if you want a title)... currently you have to guess and squint and iteratively adjust. But again, a mouse mode would make it much less painful, so I’d say that is the primary need.

One super-annoying thing about the balloon labels (pop-up upon mouse hover) was that if I accidentally had the cursor over some atom when I started the script, the balloon would stay there and not go away until the whole script finishes. Maybe that's not your department, however. Maybe I should open a ticket.
Thanks
Elaine

On Apr 13, 2017, at 12:13 PM, Tom Goddard wrote:

Hi Elaine,

The labels look great! The matching colors works well.

Let me see if I understand all the trouble you had with the current half-baked ChimeraX 2d labels:

1) No frames option to fade in/out and move labels.
2) No mouse mode to interactively position labels.
3) Label can only be a single color. Isn’t this also a limitation of Chimera 1?

Tom

[Tom Goddard]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Elaine Meng
Subject: Re: movie labels
Date: April 13, 2017 at 12:33:43 PM PDT
To: Tom Goddard

Oooh, thought of one more thing. I sometimes (in Chimera1 too) wished for label size to be proportional to window size, so that if you decided to resize the window you didn’t have to change all the labels too. There are pros and cons and it may not be feasible anyway… also it may not be important, since you can make images and movies at a different size than the window size and the labels should automatically be proportional. It’s just that I usually want to make the window the same as the desired image/movie size so I can see exactly how it’s going to turn out.
Elaine

[Tom Goddard]

6) Save labels in sessions.
7) Export commands to create current labels. Used to put into script when labels positioned with mouse.

Eric notes that Chimera 1 2d label gui can use different colors and fonts within the same label, but command does not support that.

8) Might want to make 2d labels be models maybe under a top level 2D Labels group model.

[Elaine Meng]

Here is a crazy idea for specifying font type, color, size and maybe even symbols.  At first I was thinking only in terms of inline changes, but since I do a lot of HTML editing It would be so cool if the command supported <i></i> (italics) <b> </b> bold, and nesting those two to make bold italics, and <font color=colorname> </font> and <font size=size> </font>.  Then there are the HTML encodings for symbols like alpha, beta, ampersand, etc. which seem to be much easier to look up these days than unicode strings.  Can the HTML parsing for tool panels be leveraged somehow?

Elaine

[Tom Goddard]

Have added saving 2D labels in sessions.