| controlling widget layout [message #55460] |
Wed, 22 August 2007 09:26  |
rclark
Messages: 12
Registered: September 1992
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Junior Member |
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Greetings all,
I am trying to clean up the layout of a widget application. It has
a control panel and a draw widget. I'd like to control the grouping
of the control buttons, sliders, and information displayed on the
panel.
The panel is set up as a COLUMN oriented base widget as the parent of
some ROW base widgets. Asorted buttons, sliders, and stuff are on the
various ROW widgets. I've got the basic organization set up ok (and
everything even works! so why am I not happy:-). I'm just wanting to
clean it up a little-- in particular, I'm wanting to put some extra
vertical space between some of the rows to visually group things
better.
I've checked the documentation about the X,Y OFFSET and SIZE keywords.
It looks pretty ugly and high maintanance, not to mention non protable.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about cross platform issues-- we're
mostly linux, a little solaris. But there are issues with monitors of
varying sizes and resolutions to consider.
Does anyone know any tricks or shortcuts that might help? I'm still
fairly new to writing widget applications, have I missed something
that should have been obvious?
Thanks for any pointers or hints.
Richard
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| Re: controlling widget layout [message #55660 is a reply to message #55460] |
Tue, 28 August 2007 10:38  |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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Richard Clark writes:
> SPACE is useful.
> YPAD helps a little but doesn't do quite what I was wanting. It puts
> space both above and below the row. I was wanting space above row N,
> or below row N-1 because there is a row N+1 where I don't want the
> extra space... like a blank line between paragraphs in text.
>
> I had also experimented a little with the ALIGN and BASE_ALIGN
> keywords. But in my app they don't seem to have much affect at all.
I've never had much luck with the ALIGN keywords on normal
widgets. They tend to change the natural width of widgets in
ways I never fully understand. I do use a lot of BASE_ALIGN
keywords in base widgets. I can futz around with this layout
for a couple of hours and eventually get something I like,
but at the end of the day I wonder why I bothered. No one
but me seems to notice, and the whole thing looks different
when I put it on my clients UNIX machine anyway. :-(
Cheers,
David
P.S. I *have* completely re-written all the widgets as objects,
however, and one of the reasons I did so was to have a great
deal more control over how things lay out and align with other
widgets. As least *that* part gives me some satisfaction. :-)
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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