wxRuby: Changing Text Fonts and Colours

A reader recently asked me how to change the text font size and color for wxRuby controls such as the StaticText control. Let's take a look at how you can do this.

Imagine, if you will, that we have a StaticText control named my_control...

Changing Fonts

We'll begin by creating a new Font object by calling the Font.new() method:

my_font = Wx::Font.new()

Next, we'll set various attributes of our new Font object:

my_font.set_point_size(20)
my_font.set_family(Wx::FONTFAMILY_MODERN)
my_font.set_style(Wx::FONTSTYLE_ITALIC) 
my_font.set_weight(Wx::FONTWEIGHT_BOLD)

Once we have our Font object defined to our satisfaction, we can then pass it to our control's set_font() method:

my_control.set_font(my_font)

Changing Colors

Text color is not an attribute of the Font object, but is rather the foreground color of the control. So, to change the color of the text, we call the control's set_foreground_colour() method and pass it a Colour object. We'll make it easy and use one of wxRuby's built-in Colour constants:

my_control.set_foreground_colour(Wx::RED)

Make a note of the spelling: colour, not color.

Further Reading

A simple working example can be found here.

Documentation of the Font object can be found here.

Documentation of the set_foreground_colour() method can be found here.

Documentation of the Colour object can be found here.

And there you have it. Let me know if you'd like to see more on this or other subjects.

Thanks for stopping by!