Highlighting

Highlighting is a feature that allows user-specified rows in the SNV database to be highlighted. In order for highlighting to be active, it must be turned on in the Preferences. By default, highlighting is not enabled.

Highlighting is visible in the SNV Main Window. Highlighting affects the Attributions column, and turns the text in that column different colors. The color chosen is under end user control.

Once highlighting is enabled in Preferences, the rows that are highlighted are controlled by special text files placed in the SNV Installation highlight subdirectory (C:\Program Files\SNV4\highlight by default). SNV will search for any file with the filename extension (the part of the filename after the period) "highlight". For example, the following are all valid names that SNV will search for highlighting control information:

myHighlights.highlight
BigDDOs.highlight
1866RPDs.highlight

You can have as many highlight control files as you wish, so that you can organize your highlighting into categories.

The contents of each highlight file consists of as many lines as you desire, each line specifying the highlighting of a particular variety. The format of each line is:

year SNV-attribution Highlight-color

The year is a simple four digit year. The year you enter is validated against the possible years covered by the SNV database.

The SNV Attribution is attribution number in the format specified on the Attributions page. There are a couple special features associated with how the attribution is specified. If you want a particular die stage (e.g. S1-1001.5) of a variety to be highlighted, enter the attribution for that die stage in full. If you enter only the base attribution (e.g. S1-1001), by default all die stages of S1-1001 will be highlighted. If you want only the base attribution to be highlighted and none of the die stages to be highlighted, use the a special form of the attribution suffixed by a period zero (e.g. S1-1001.0).

The Highlight Color may be any one of the following:

blue, cyan, gray, magenta, orange, pink, red, yellow

If you make a mistake in the syntax of a line in a highlight file and SNV can't understand what you intended, SNV will just ignore the line - nothing bad will happen. You will not receive a notification of the syntax error.

If you specify the same variety for highlighting in multiple highlight control files, SNV will arbitrarily pick one of them. So it's best to make sure that you only specify a given variety once across all the highlight control files.

SNV ships with an example highlight control file named "top20.highlight". If you leave this file in the SNV installation directory and enable highlighting, then the varieties listed on the Top 20 Page at ShieldNickels.Net will be highlighted in blue. The contents of the top20.highlight file are:

1866 S1-3001.0 blue
1867 S1-3001.0 blue
1868 S2-4000.0 blue
1869 S1-0000.0 blue
1870 S1-8001.0 blue
1870 S1-7002.0 blue
1870 S1-2002.0 blue
1872 S2-1015.2 blue
1872 S2-7003.0 blue
1873 S1-1001.0 blue
1873 S2-3000.0 blue
1874 S1-1002.0 blue
1874 S1-1003.0 blue
1876 S1-1000.0 blue
1876 S1-7000.0 blue
1876 S1-8000.0 blue
1883 S1-5001.0 blue

Note how the top20.highlight file uses the suffix ".0" on most of the attributions so as to highlight only the base variety. For 1872 S2-1015.2, the exact die stage is specified because the base variety is not in the Top 20.

Highlighting provides you with yet another way to view the SNV database. You can even use a Special Filter to see only the highlighted entries.

The highlighting control files are only read once at SNV initialization, so if you edit them while SNV is active the changes won't be noticed until you exit and restart SNV.

Highlighting may be disabled in demo versions of SNV.