default settings for ViVa waveform viewer

 Found the solution. It is possible to define environment variables for ViVa in the .cdsenv file.

In my case, I used 

wavescan.trace lineThickness string "bold"

This got me what I wanted. The ViVa help button turned out to be pretty useful in this case. Ought to have checked before posting.

Vivek

 Thats interesting when i select help-->contents and search for 

"wavescan.trace" it can find that anywhere.

If i search on "line" I do find

viva.trace lineThickness tring "fine" nil

Which when i place this in the cdsenv file  changing the fine to bold and correcing the misspelled "tring" it doesn't work until you remove the "nil" from the back end.

This works from the command line,

envSetVal("viva.trace" "lineThickness" 'string "medium")

These variables are only used for standalone ViVA use. If you are plotting signals from ADE, the line thickness and colours and line styles are controlled by the display.drf settings for layers y0-y9; this is so that probed nets show the same style and colour as they do in the corresponding schematic.

Regards,

Andrew.

Viva for me *is* being launched by ADE, so using the viva.trace variables isn't working as Andrew warns.

I tried changing definition of y0 using the DRM, but this *also* had no effect on the yellow trace plotted by viva.

 The default trace thickness is so thin as to be almost invisible on initial display, and certainly invisible once snapped and inserted into a presentation and shown on a projector.

If possible, I'd also like to default to sold line vs dotted, AND to use a white background with black axes.

Some of the viva settings seem relevant based on names but don't seem to have any effect.  Of all of these settings, only the first seems to do anything:

  viva.axis font string "Default,12,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0"

  viva.axis minorGridForeground string "white"

  viva.axis background string "white"

  viva.axis foreground string "black"

  viva.axis majorGridForeground string "white"

  viva.trace lineThickness string "medium" 

And as long as I'm asking for the moon, any way to make the grid color be something other than "almost exactly the same as the background" ? 

 It is clear that the defaults for this tool were selected by someone that doesn't need to use this tool. 

 Dear Jeff,

 > Some of the viva settings seem relevant based on names but don't seem to have any effect.

The number of variables that are actually implemented is limited.To find out which variables are available to set, look in the following file:

<IC615_install_dir>/tools/dfII/etc/tools/viva/.cdsenv

The variables that are not commented out have been implemented.

To modify the variables permanently from your .cdsinit file, I've included a sample of the section of my .cdsinit file:

; ViVa default fonts to Clean

; Added from Wayne Ingram's note on 7/24/2013
;
; If customer is setting font related cdsenv variables in .cdsinit (via envSetVal API),
; there's a requirement to load the 'viva' context _before_ any envSetVal call is made.
; This can be achieved by the following in the .cdsinit file:

loadContext(strcat(prependInstallPath("etc/context/") "viva.cxt"))
callInitProc("viva")

envSetVal("viva.graph" "titleFont" 'string "Clean,12,-1,5,55,0,0,0,0,0")
envSetVal("viva.axis" "font" 'string "Clean,12,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0")
envSetVal("viva.horizMarker" "font" 'string "Clean,12,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0")

I hope this helps,

Shawn

Jeff Sonntag said:

 It is clear that the defaults for this tool were selected by someone that doesn't need to use this tool. 

Sounds a bit odd. I use this tool a lot, and the defaults are generally reasonable for me... 

Not clear which version you're talking about, but if you have an issue, then you should contact customer support. Maybe there's an issue where we are not taking into account your environment properly.

Note that the y0-y9 layers (or rather the packets used by those layers) are used to draw the traces for signals plotted as outputs in ADE. This is so that lines on the schematic are probed with the same color/style as the graph. Waveforms plotted as a result of calculator expressions don't use y0-y9 but should be more guided by the cdsenv defaults.

As for the settings, as Shawn said, some haven't been implemented (some are there historically still because of the Java version of ViVA). For example, the viva.axis background hasn't been implemented - instead you need to use:

viva.rectGraph       background      string  "white"

If that's set, you can set the viva.axis foreground to black. You could set the axis foreground to some other colour, but there is automatic sense in there to stop you plotting black on black or white on white. So setting the rectGraph background to white will automatically make the axis labelling black.

The lineThickness works OK for me.

I don't think the major/minor grid colours can currently be changed, That's one for customer support if it's not to your liking.

Regards,

Andrew.