Button settings

These settings are used to manage and configure the buttons defined within a menu.

Button control

These controls allow you to select a button for review or edit or the  'Edit' option allows you cut, copy, paste and clear a button.

You can also export the button definition such that it can be imported into other menus or shared with other Flexi-deck users.

Buttons can be disabled to create a fully transparent (and active area) area at the button location.  This allows you to create irregular shaped menus as suits.

Button functional settings

These settings specify the button characteristics and actions when in use:

Setting group	Description
	Specifies the text, text colour and positional information for square menus or fine width adjustment for circular menus. Fo circular menus the text is, by default, restricted in width so as
	Overrides the default button colours defined at the menu level and allows you to specify an icon to be used in the button.  A default set of icons ships with flexi-deck but any supported graphics can be selected and will be adjusted to fit in the icon area as appropriate. See below for more information about icon usage below. Buttons that invoke another menu, either directly or as part of a macro will show a small graphical indicator in the button unless disabled.
	Defines the action associated with the button when the button receives a left or right single or double click (four different activation possibilities).  A button action can be menu or macro related. You can select a macro from the macro structure or drag and drop a macro from the macro editor.  The macro path within the macro editor is shown along with the macro description, if defined.
	Free format description of the button function for reference purposes, useful if the buttons are made available to other users or for general documentation purposes.

Icon considerations

A button can contain an icon image to help indicate the action associated with the button. When used in 2 ring circular menus then, due to likely button size restrictions, where both text and icons are defined then the icon is shown instead of the text. With rectangle menus both icon and text is always show.

Custom icons

Because buttons have a configurable background colour, that can also have a degree of transparency, then alternative custom images or icons should, where possible, be created with a transparent background, such that only the icon is displayed and seen on the button and not the background colour. Images that have a background colour won't look correct unless the colour is exactly the same as the button colour and the button colour is 100% opaque.

There are tools around to convert image background colours to be transparent without leaving rough edges around the icons, such as Photoshop, but its best to try and source icons / images that already have transparent backgounds where possible.

Our recommendation for custom icons is to have the icons in png format, have a transparent background, have square dimensions (so width and height are the same), and with dimensions that are at least as large as how big the icon will appear in the menu. On a retina display,  its dimensions should be twice the size in order to take advantage of the increased pixel density.

Flexi-deck will automatically scale the icon to size proportionally so its dimensions don't have to be perfect. But if it's too small it'll look pixelated and if it's too big it'll make the file size of the project file bigger than is strictly necessary.

The current set of built-in icons are 64x64 pixels so it makes sense to standardize around this size if possible.

Where icons are being created to order then if they are available in vector format (like .ai or .svg files) it allows for the creation of icons any size required.

It also helps to have the icons be white pixels on a transparent background. The white pixels are important so the colour of the icon can be defined as required when used in FD.

Built-in icons use #F0F0F0 as their base colour.