Working with schematics on a white background

Just found some more information. A long time ago I thought I'd figured out how to make the selected items show up in a non-white color by editing stuff in the display.drf file. However, it hasn't been working that way in forever and I just thought maybe I was remembering it wrong. I just now discovered that if I descend into a schematic cell that is in a different library to the rest of the schematics I've been working in that selected wires etc. DO highlight in a different color to white (i.e. they're not invisible). For schematics in ALL libraries, all the wire/symbol/etc. colors are as I defined in my display.drf but only in that one special library do the selected items show up in a non-white color. 

Can anybody please point me to some clue I can use to further track this down. 

A good place to look is in Chapter 3, Technology File Layer Definitions of the Virtuoso Technology Data ASCII Files Reference. If you search in this chapter for the "Layout Objects" section, it has a good coverage of the various layer-purpose pairs that are used for various things in the tools (plus links to other relevant documents).

From this table, it shows that you'd need to change the color of the packet associated with hilite drawing. I just checked that and sure enough that does affect the color of selection.

The reason why it may be different for one library is that the technology file for that library may use a different packet name for hilite drawing, and hence have a different color.

Regards,

Andrew.

Thanks. I actually did know (maybe only a little) about that and did have the colors set like I wanted in my display.drf. I had:

( display      hilite               blank      dashed     red   red   outline   )

however, my schematic world hasn't complied with that for a while now. It turns out (and I didn't know this when I first posted) that there can be many display.drf files that Virtuoso finds and I couldn't figure out what was coming from where. After much lengthy trial and error I finally discovered that all of the selection colors could (for the world as I have it right now) be controlled by adding the following in my display.drf 

( display     defaultPacket               blank      dashed     red   red   outline   )

I thought I'd tack on additional comments to this old thread because I believe I got to the bottom of this issue. Andrew rightly pointed out that the packet associated with "hilite drawing" does change the color of highlighted items - but only items you've "hard" selected i.e. mouse clicked on, or selected using a mouse selection window. If you're just hovering over an item the pre-selection highlighting color I kept seeing was yellow. Same thing with the rubber-banded lines when stretching or resizing things - all yellow on a white background and devastatingly hard to see. I tried modifying everything to do with hilite and drawing in the Display Resource Editor and it didn't make any difference to that stuff.

Turns out the yellow dynamic highlighting color isn't dealt with in the Display Resource Editor, it's dealt with in .Xdefaults where I had to add the lines:

Opus.dragColor: red
Opus.selectColor: red
Opus.highlightColor: red

I then restarted Cadence and all my yellow-fever was gone - I now had an easy to see red color:-).

As an aside, after editing the .Xdefaults file you're supposed to do:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

I thought I'd tack on additional comments to this old thread because I believe I got to the bottom of this issue. Andrew rightly pointed out that the packet associated with "hilite drawing" does change the color of highlighted items - but only items you've "hard" selected i.e. mouse clicked on, or selected using a mouse selection window. If you're just hovering over an item the pre-selection highlighting color I kept seeing was yellow. Same thing with the rubber-banded lines when stretching or resizing things - all yellow on a white background and devastatingly hard to see. I tried modifying everything to do with hilite and drawing in the Display Resource Editor and it didn't make any difference to that stuff.

Turns out the yellow dynamic highlighting color isn't dealt with in the Display Resource Editor, it's dealt with in .Xdefaults where I had to add the lines:

Opus.dragColor: red
Opus.selectColor: red
Opus.highlightColor: red

I then restarted Cadence and all my yellow-fever was gone - I now had an easy to see red color:-).

As an aside, after editing the .Xdefaults file you're supposed to do:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults