[Tcl-bugs] [ tktoolkit-Bugs-3580194 ] Width too narrow on MacOS X

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Bugs item #3580194, was opened at 2012-10-25 12:11
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by reowen
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Category: 20. [tk_optionMenu]
Group: current: 8.5.12
Status: Open
Resolution: Invalid
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Russell Owen (reowen)
Assigned to: Kevin Walzer (wordtech)
Summary: Width too narrow on MacOS X

Initial Comment:
The -width option on tk_optionMenu results in a widget that is far too narrow to display that many characters on MacOS X. If -indicatoron is 1 the result is even worse (even less of the text is displayed). For example:

tk_optionMenu .om omVar DC1 DC2 DC3
.om configure -width 3
pack .om

this displays as expected on Linux, but the widget is far too narrow on MacOS X.

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>Comment By: Russell Owen (reowen)
Date: 2012-11-07 08:29

Message:
I posted two screen shots on unix. I don't have access to Windows.

I didn't realize tk_optionMenu had switched to using native widgets. If the
desired behavior is that the widgets tend to look good with "reasonable"
parameters on all platforms (I hope that width and indicatoron are both
still considered reasonable), I would think the math for controlling width
may have to be different for different platforms.

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Comment By: Russell Owen (reowen)
Date: 2012-11-07 08:19

Message:
On unix the width parameter specifies characters, not pixels, and the
displayed widget shows that many characters whether indicatoron is true or
false.

I believe that is the standard, expected behavior, though I did not find
the documentation for tk_optionMenu very enlightening. (Most of my coding
is in python Tkinter, so I tend to rely on the Tkinter documentation. But
that's no help when reporting bugs in tcl/tk).

Thus I am confused when you talk about width being in pixels. It may be so
on aqua, but surely that is a bug?

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Comment By: Kevin Walzer (wordtech)
Date: 2012-11-07 08:08

Message:
"Thus the correct fix (I believe) is to compute the width to send
to the underlying widget differently on aqua than other platforms."

I don't understand this. Three pixels is three pixels. The following code
implements the "width" parameter:

 Tk_Fill3DRectangle(tkwin, (Pixmap) macWin, mbPtr->normalBorder, 0, 0,
	    Tk_Width(tkwin), Tk_Height(tkwin), 0, TK_RELIEF_FLAT);

How should this be changed? 

There are limits to how we can manipulate a native widget. If you set a
more narrow width than the button's customary metrics, it will happily draw
that width, and clip the text in doing so. 

Can you post a screenshot of how this looks on other platforms,
particularly Windows? Linux is also OK, but there we're not using a native
widget. 

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Comment By: Russell Owen (reowen)
Date: 2012-11-07 07:56

Message:
Note that it is not an issue of 3 being intrinsically too narrow for Mac,
but that any specified width is always too narrow for that many characters
of text. Thus the correct fix (I believe) is to compute the width to send
to the underlying widget differently on aqua than other platforms.

Sometimes it is important to specify a width: for example if the user may
choose options of varying width and the overall size of the parent window
should remain the same.

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Comment By: Kevin Walzer (wordtech)
Date: 2012-11-07 06:57

Message:
This issue is easily avoided by not specifying a width and letting Tk draw
the menubutton with default metrics, cf. omit the ".m configure -width 3"
command. Under Aqua, the menubutton is drawn with a native widget, and a
width of three pixels simply may not be compatible with those metrics. 

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