Total Access Components Tour: Text Effects

The Text Effects control is a databound control that is used to spice up the display of text on your forms and reports. You can change the angle that text is displayed, and choose various three-D styles.

Rotating Text

The Angle property of the Text Effects control can be set to any value between 0 and 360. Use a value of 90 to create vertical text with the top of the text facing to the left, or 270 to create text with the top of the text on the right. A value of 180 displays the text upside down.

The Value property determines the words displayed in the Text Effects control, and the Text Style property determines the appearance of the words. The appearance can be normal, three-D or shadowed. EffectOffset property determines the “depth” of the three-D effect. Each increment in this property increases the depth of the effect by one pixel.

The Text Effects control has four color properties. The BackColor property determines the color of the background of the control. The ForeColor property determines the color of the text in the Value property. The other two properties, HighlightColor and ShadowColor, are only visible if the TextStyle property of the control is set to Three-D or Shadow.

Note: If you plan to use rotated text, you must specify a TrueType font. Non-TrueType fonts cannot be rotated.

Refreshing the Display

Use the DoPaint method to force an immediate display of the control when you change one or more of its property values. Ordinarily this method is not required. Windows automatically displays the changes as soon as it is given enough processing time. However, if you are rapidly changing the value of one or more properties of the control (for example in a tight programming loop or in response to user input with a Slider control), the DoPaint method ensures that each change is immediately displayed.

Text Effects Properties

Text Effects Methods

Text Effects Events