Hi, > That way of building a window tends to produce programs that port > badly to other systems. hmm, I don't think so. I've build several applications in C + GTK/Glade and Python + GTK/Glade, which easily run on Linux and Windows without any GUI changes.
> playing with Java applets introduced > the novel and somewhat strange idea that your window should be built > using rules and layouts, to avoid problems with button sizes, fonts, > etc, etc. Do you know the container-concept of GTK+ and Glade? In many GUI-builders, you set your widgets to fixed positions (e.g. a text field at x16/y16 with 100*30 pixels, a button at x16/y50 with 100*50 pixels etc.). This is *bad*, and causes all kinds of problems with e.g. different window- or font-sizes, like widgets outside of the visible window, text running over the border of a widget or being cut at the edge of the widget etc. But: GTK+ has a wonderful concept of "containers" [*]. You normally don't set widgets to fixed positions -- instead, you add layout tables (or vertical boxes or horizontal boxes or ...), and essentially define that some widgets should be above each other, side by side or in a grid layout, so you more or less define the layout logically. The real size and position of the widgets is dynamically calculated by GTK+, so they always have the right size, and different font sizes, different window sizes, etc. are not a problem anymore [q]. And Glade (the GTK+ GUI builder) works exactly that way. [*] Besides, the container-concept also allows such nice things like putting anything inside a button (e.g. 2 images and a label), or inside a notebook tab etc. pp. [q] In Qt, it's also possible to generate such flexible layouts. But it's unfortunately not the default way in Qt, and the Qt designer only supports it rudimentarily, and in a much less obvious way. And Qt does not have such a "container"-concept, where many widgets (e.g. buttons, notebook registers etc.) contain other widgets. > You have to think about your window differently - think about what > you're putting where, rather than going visually "that looks about > right" - but the reward is that it'll look right no matter where you > run your app. Yes, that's also true for GTK+/Glade. But you have the choice to either build you GUI graphically with your mouse, or textually in your editor -- or mix both. regards Roland -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
