Choosing a Pattern

Documentation / Contents - Background

• Overview of the Background Panel
  • The Two Pages
  • The Buttons Along the Bottom
• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
  • The Picture List
  • The Preview and the Facts Line
• Placing a Picture
  • Fill (crop to fit)
  • Stretch
  • Scale (letterbox)
  • Center
  • Tile
• Colour Schemes
  • The Scheme List
  • Lock Scheme to Wallpaper
  • Make Scheme From Wallpaper
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live
  • Adding Your Own Pictures
• Copyright Information

Choosing a Pattern

The Patterns page is the panel IRIX shipped: a named list down the left, a square preview beside it, and up to four colour swatches under the preview.

Six patterns are built in.

Dither 1x1    the finest checker, a plain optical blend
Dither 2x2    a coarser checker
Weave         a woven basket texture
Grid          thin ruled lines
Diagonal      a diagonal rule
Speckle       a scattered stipple

Select one and the preview redraws. Press Apply to set it.

They Take Their Colours From Your Scheme

A pattern has no colours of its own. It is drawn in the colours of the current desktop colour scheme, which is why the swatches under the preview show what those colours are, and why changing your scheme changes the look of the pattern without your touching this page. See Colour Schemes.

That is what makes patterns worth having on a machine with a small display or a shallow colour depth: they cost almost nothing to draw, they never clash with the windows on top of them, and they never fight the scheme.

They Tile Seamlessly

Each pattern repeats at its own natural period, and the tile is generated at exactly that period. There is no visible seam and no moire on a large screen, because the repeat is the smallest one the pattern actually has rather than a convenient round number.

A pattern is always tiled. The placement controls on the Pictures page do not apply to it. See Placing a Picture.

The Preview

The preview is 150 pixels square and sits in an etched frame, at the size the original panel used. It is a swatch of the pattern, not a scaled picture of your whole screen, so what you see in it is the pattern at its real size.

See Choosing a Picture for the photographic wallpapers.