Subject: Re: Insert Symbol dialog
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2000 - 20:16:57 CST
At 09:46 AM 1/27/00 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>My solution would be very platform specific though.
Yep. And that's a huge problem. Any problem which we can figure out how to
solve in XP code is a *huge* win, because we each get maximum leverage out
of the coding time spent by people on other platforms.
- For example, Shaw spent weeks doing a ton of XP work to make the
Paragraph dialog work on GTK. I spent maybe a day or two porting it to
Windows, mostly because I needed to add new widget types (tabs and
spinners).
- For example, Alexey has already done 90% of the work to implement Insert
Date and Time. As soon as we get that work checked in for Win32, every
other platform can have a working dialog in hours or less.
Dialogs already force us to spend too much time in platform code hooking
together widgets. We don't want to make that problem even worse.
Please take another look at what Shaw's been doing with the Preview widgets
in, say, the Paragraph or Zoom dialogs.
I suspect you could achieve an effect a lot like Word's dialog or NT's
unnecessarily complex Character Map applet without a ton of work. That
entire drawing area can be repainted via XP graphics calls, and as I
suggested, the only new XP functionality needed would be some way of
handling hit-tests to figure out where the mouse clicks occurred.
The rest of the dialog can be coded using fairly straightforward widgets and
behaviors.
>I really appreciate the non-modal "Insert Symbol" dialogs in other WP's
>I've used. It is nice to have the "Insert Symbol" up on a different part
>of the screen ready to be used to insert a "pi" or "gamma". In my opinion
>Abi would be significantly worse with a modal "Insert Symbol".
Gotcha. I presume that you'd want *one* modeless symbol dialog across the
entire app, which sent keystrokes to whichever window last had the focus,
right?
Paul
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