LabVIEW Graph Annotations
I recently talked to a student who would print out his LabVIEW graphs for his homework and then circle and label a point on them before handing them in.
While that approach certainly gets the job done, there is a simple way to label important graph points within LabVIEW: annotations.
You can right-click on a LabVIEW graph at edit time and select Data Operations>Create Annotation. (On a graph in a running VI, Create Annotation is in the top-level right-click menu).
You’ll get a dialog that lets you define the annotation name and some attributes. After you dismiss this dialog and create the annotation, you can right-click on it and change other attributes (e.g. color). (Important note: right-click on the annotation point, not the label).
Did you know that the LabVIEW Help is available on ni.com? You can read more about Graph Annotations there, and also rate the help topic and leave comments that help NI improve the documentation in future versions!
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One of the biggest problems I have with annotations (and judging by your screen shot, you must have noticed it too) is that they are always placed with a yellow color. This is fine on black backgrounds, but on white / light colours the annotations are almost invisible.
The only way around this right now is to continually poll the Annotation List propertyand try to determine if a new annotation has been added and then set its color accordingly. If only there were an event that could be fired / the ability to set the default… (http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Add-annotation-change-events-for-charts/idi-p/1133460)
Hi Shaun,
Yes, I agree that the default annotation color should be a graph property. Looks like we need the same for cursors, too. I encourage everyone who wants this addition to vote for your request on Idea Exchange. NI is being very responsive to Idea Exchange requests, and this one seems like it would be very reasonable to implement.
- Christina
Two benefits of hand-drawing the annotations on a piece of paper – it’s more attractive, and you can change the font!
http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Customized-Fonts-for-Graph-Annotation/idi-p/1073784#M4259
http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Add-Line-Width-and-Line-Style-to-Cursor-List-Property/idc-p/1073223#M4243
Someone on info-labview asked me about changing the annotation font recently. I agree that it needs to be made available both through the menus and VI server. In the meantime, however, I found there is a workaround (sort of):
Unfortunately, there is no way to change the cursor legend’s column headers to use a different font size, so this workaround is probably only useful if you don’t need the cursor legend for the graph.
Great tip! I posted this small tutorial on the LabVIEW forums: http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=504364