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The Model Editor Appears in Black and White

If the model editor appears in black and white rather than colour (this will not be apparent until you create a new component) then some other application has used up the default colour table so that SLIME can not allocate enough colours to operate properly. The usual culprits are World Wide Web viewers and the AIPS TV. Shut down any programs that use large blocks of the colour table and then shut down and restart SLIME. After you have restarted SLIME, you can restart the other programs.

There are two useful tricks that can stop this happening. The first is to run a program that uses the Display PostScript extension before starting any program that uses a large colormap. Display PostScript allocates a colour cube when the first Display PostScript program is started so this technique reserves a block of the default colormap for use by Dispaly PostScript programs (including SLIME).

The second technique is to force programs that use large colormaps to allocate their own private colormaps rather than taking up large parts of the default colormap. For example, you can run netscape with the -install flag or you can configure the AIPS TV to use a large number of colours. This will mean that the rest of the screen will ``go technicolor'' when you are looking at these applications but they will not interfere with other programs that require only a few colour slots from the default colormap.



Chris Flatters
Thu Mar 14 16:02:50 MST 1996