Menu appearances

[CWBillow]

Is there a way to have the menus in UC look [selected items, color etc.] like those in UltraEdit -- which follow the color/font settings of the o/s defaults?

They would be a bit easier to see.

Regards,
Chuck Billow

[Mofi]

I tried what happens with main menu of UC Professional 8.30.0.1004 if I change height of menu, font, font size, background color and font color in Windows XP desktop settings, and the menu of UC was updated accordingly after pressing button Apply in the desktop configuration dialog. So I don't see any problem with style of main menu of UC. It uses the settings of the operating system, at least on Windows XP SP3 with Classic desktop style. The menu item font was not immediately applied to the menu items. It was necessary to restart UC. But than all Windows menu settings worked.

[CWBillow]

The menu on the left is UltraEdit. The right is UltraCompare.

Regards,
Chuck Billow

[rhapdog]

Mofi, I have tested this myself, using XP Classic theme, and looked at UltraCompare Professional 8.30.5.1000 and UEStudio, Windows Explorer, Firefox, and a more recent version of MS Office.

What I found was that the "menu highlight" item in UE is like XP's Explorer menu highlight (and Firefox), and the UltraCompare menu highlight is like that of Microsoft Word and other newer MS products. At least in XP.

By using this OS and theme, I was able to determine the underlying reason behind the menu highlighting differences. This is, at this time, MY opinion on what is actually happening, and has not been confirmed by IDM.

There is a definite difference here in how the menu highlights are drawn. In UC, it uses the menu highlight color to "outline" the menu item, then it "blends" that color with the background color for the inside color of the box, while keeping the text color of the menu item unchanged. In UE, it uses only the one highlight color for the menu item, and the text color changes in order to make it readable.

In essence, UC is "mimicking" the menu behaviors of Windows Vista and above, while UE leaves it up to the OS to determine how the menus are drawn. Because of this difference, UC isn't quite getting it right to make it identical to how the OS does it, which the UE menu seems to indicate. UC should be checking the OS version and should only do the "menu enhancement" for XP.

I know of no way to change this except to write IDM Support and let them know what is going on.

[CWBillow]

At least I know I'm not going crazy!

Thanks,
Chuck

[Mofi]

Ah, yes, the highlighting of active menu item is different and the background color when using my desktop scheme.

Well, this is most likely caused by GDI+ interface and is probably the same issue as discussed on ClearType on UltraEdit 15. UltraCompare still does not evaluate the cleartype setting as UltraEdit does. In UltraCompare Segoe UI font is used in status bar even when Windows Classic desktop scheme without cleartype is selected by the user. I reported this Dec. 2009 to IDM support, but I was most likely the only user reported this as there is no change since this report.

[CWBillow]

It seems that there are certain aspects of Windows development that can be set as "defaults" [use whatever the appearance settings dictate] and then sometimes they are as the developer envisions them instead, taking away that uniformity.

Ah well...

Thanks,
Chuck