Adding Tool Tips
While users often find tool tips helpful, they can, if overused, be more of a nuisance than a help. Also, as a user becomes more familiar with your GUI, he or she may feel the tool tips are getting "in the way". Therefore, a couple of recommendations are in order for starters:
- Use tool tips judiciously. It's usually not necessary to provide one for every control.
- Make use of the Enable Tool Tips pin to provide the user with a way to turn them off.
To add a tool tip to a control area, click the Enable Tool Tip box so that it is checked. This will reveal a set of options that let you customize the tool tip. The options for a List type control are shown below:
You can choose to have the tool tip display either the information from the Description field or the currently selected list item by clicking the Source radio buttons.
For Numeric type controls, you can choose between the Description field and the Value String.
By default, the selected source will also be sent to its normal output pin, but if that is not desired, click to check the Disable pin output box.
The tool tip's maximum width (before the text wraps to the next line) can be adjusted from 50 to 500 pixels.
By default, a tool tip will be displayed for 5 seconds after the mouse begins hovering over an area. This can be adjusted from 1 to 60 seconds. A tool tip may also be dismissed immediately by clicking directly on it.
Clicking the Background or Text color swatches will open a standard color chooser dialog:
Any custom colors you create and save by adding them to the 16 available slots will be saved in your VST's layout file, and reloaded when you open your project.
You
can choose from the same selection of fonts that is available in other DH
sub-controls.
If the selected font is not installed on the user's machine, another font in the same font family will be substituted.
When
you add a tool tip to a control, its position on the layout is marked by a
small +, which shows the location of the tool tip's upper left corner.
This can be moved independently of the rectangle by dragging it, and may be placed anywhere inside or outside of the rectangle.
If you drag the rectangle, the + moves with it, maintaining the same relative position.
Positioning your tool tips can get tedious, especially when your controls are close together, and you have to move things around to put the + marker for one control area behind another rectangle.
One thing that sometimes helps is to pull your whole
overlay off to one side where you can at least make adjustments to +
positions without having to move controls out of the way, as shown below.
Then you can move it back into position,
and switch to Run mode to see if any additional tweaks are needed.
