NewDeal Technical Support Document 233

CREATING CUSTOM BACKGROUNDS


Using NewDraw to create customized background images

You can fill the area behind all of your open windows with any color or with a picture. NewDeal software comes with several different background pictures included, but you can also create your own. Anything you can create in NewDraw can become a background image. You can include text, colored shapes, TIFF, PCX, GIF images -- anything that you can do in NewDraw. Any change to the background takes effect immediately.

How to create a background in NewDraw

  1. Create a picture in NewDraw.
  2. Select all of the objects in the picture. You can include text, graphics and imported images. You can drag to select the objects, or hold down the Control key and select them individually, or -- easiest of all -- choose Select All from the Edit menu.
  3. Choose Copy from the Edit menu. This copies the picture to the clipboard.
  4. Switch to Preferences and click Background. The Background dialog box appears.
  5. Click Get Background From Clipboard. A dialog box appears asking you to enter a filename.
  6. Enter a name and click OK. This copies the picture from the clipboard to the new file, and also immediately displays it as the background. The filename appears in the Backgrounds Available list, so you can select this picture again at a later date.
To recap: create your background image in NewDraw, select it, copy it, go to Preferences/Background, click "Get Background from Clipboard," enter the file name and you're done.

How to create a transparent background

A transparent background is one that has no background color of its own, so the background color you choose shows through the black foreground pixels, like the Full Moon background and some of the others included in the software.
  1. Import a bitmap graphic.
  2. Select Area Attributes then Draw Mode.*
  3. Copy the bitmap to the clipboard.
  4. Proceed to Preferences, Background and continue as usual.
*At Draw Mode, select one of the options. INVERSE, AND, and OR seem to deliver the best effects. All modes offer different levels of color interplay; Draw Mode AND is the route to take to simply turn a bitmap background transparent. This works with B&W or color bit maps.

Deleting Backgrounds

To delete a background, locate the file in \USERDATA\BACKGRND and delete it as you would any other file. To delete the background currently in use, switch to a different background first.

If your deleted backgrounds still appear on the list in Preferences, Background. . .

  1. Close Preferences
  2. Delete the file \PRIVDATA\GEOS device drivers
    (DOS file name: GEOS_DEV.000).
The next time you run Preferences, it will build a new device drivers file with an updated list.

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Last Modified 17 Feb 1999