Style Palette

When you draw objects in Moho, you will certainly want to control the appearance of these objects, such as fill color, line width, etc. The Style palette is where all of these values can be modified.

Overview

The style palette is a sub-window that automatically opens when you switch into Fill mode for a vector layer in Moho. In other editing modes, the style palette will automatically be hidden. The contents of the style palette update themselves depending on the currently selected fill or outline in the working area. Creating new fills and outlines is covered in the Creating Fills section of this manual, and is not covered in this chapter. Here we will discuss how to use the controls to modify an existing fill, not how to create a new one.

Fill Styles

When a fill object is selected in the main window, the Fill controls appear in the Style palette. The first thing you can do to modify a fill is change its color. Click the fill color rectangle to pick a new color for the fill. A color picker dialog will appear. Aside from the actual color of the fill, you can choose the level of transparency in the color picker dialog.

Below the fill color box are two popup menus that allow you to choose one or two fill effects to be applied. These effects include such things as color gradients, spots, and shading effects. Just pick an effect from the menu to apply it to the fill. If you choose two effects, they will be applied in order, one on top of the other. For example, you could choose "Gradient" for the first effect and "Spots" for the second effect. The result would be a color gradient for the background of the fill, with spots drawn on top of it.

To the right of the fill effects are buttons that allow you to control the specifics of the fill effect. If a fill effect has been chosen from the popup menu, these buttons will bring up a dialog that looks something like this:

This is the dialog used to control the gradient effect. The angle control determines the direction of the gradient. Below that are two controls for the colors at each end of the gradient. Finally, a preview area: after modifying the other controls, this region will display a small preview of the effect.

Outline Styles

The Outline controls are similar to the Fill controls described above. However, these controls are used to set up the outline around an object. There's a slider for the line width, a color box to set the line color, and a line effect popup menu. The line effects are different from the fill effects, but work in a similar way: choose one from the menu and modify it by clicking the button to the right.

Duplicating a Style

The right-most controls of the Style palette are two buttons: Copy and Paste. These buttons are used to duplicate a fill or line style. When a shape is selected in the main Moho window, click Copy to make a copy of its style settings. By selecting a different shape and clicking Paste, you can duplicate the style settings onto the second shape. (You can also use the Copy and Paste menu items in the Edit menu.)

Using Color Palettes

Finally, at the right end of the Style palette is a set of color swatches. You can use these as a shortcut for selecting colors for your objects. Just click a color in this palette to assign it to the selected shape. You can also click a line in this palette to set a line color and width for the selected shape. The "Colors" popup menu lets you select from different sets of color swatches. These color swatches are stored in a file called "default_palette.moho". This is just an ordinary Moho file that you are welcome to modify to create your own custom sets of color swatches.