Many 4D customers like the placement of buttons on the bottom of a form to access the most frequently used functions. However, descriptive text buttons often take up too much space at the bottom of the screen. You might be tempted to use pictures as buttons and save valuable screen space, but pictures can take up too much memory.

Using the same pictures over and over again is an inefficient use of memory. In addition, each picture on a form is treated by 4D as a separate object. It takes 4D time to calculate the desired location for each object on the form.

A more efficient method of displaying pictures which are used over and over again, is to store the picture(s) in the 4D picture library. When using an image from the library, 4D creates a pointer to the image and displays the picture on the form. 4D doesn't copy the picture to the form, nor can you edit the picture except within the library. For all of the occurances a picture is used from the library, it is only stored once in memory. No matter how many forms, it is only stored in memory once.