Styles Workshop

The Styles workshop lets you create and manage styles. Styles are sets of property definitions you apply to actors to easily implement consistent appearances and behaviors.

To display this work shop, click Workshop > Properties > Styles or Styles > Show/Hide Styles Workshop . You can subscribe actors to styles so that all subscribed actors update automatically when a style changes . For example, you can define a style to format all labels with blue background and red text. You can then automatically subscribe new label actors to this style or selectively apply the style as needed. Every style has a Family property that associates the style with an actor type. For example, to make a style for arrows, set Family to Markups. To make a style available for all actor types, set Family to Generic. Each actor family can have its own default style, which is applied by default to new actors in that family. When a family does not have a default style, the default Generic style is applied.

Notes:

• Use the Styles tab to view the style gallery, apply styles to actors, and subscribe actors to styles.
• Actor properties defined by styles are listed in the Properties pane in categories named Style (subscribed): style_name and are read-only. To change a subscribed property, you must change the style in the Styles workshop or unsubscribe the actor from the style.
• When no other styles are set as defaults, all actors use the _Default Style style . This style calls the built-in Default style style but can be modified by editing < install_dir>\bin\_Default Style.smgStyleSet.
• You cannot use the Text pane to specify string property values in the Styles workshop. You can embed property values by typing property keywords or by copying keywords generated by the Text pane.

Styles are saved as profiles. For details, see Profiles.