[Flightgear-devel] spanning multiple columns in gui layout

[John D. <sf...@av...>]

Here's a creeping feature that would be useful, and
shouldn't be too hard to implement:

Here's the scenario:  Suppose you have a nice table with
rows and columns.  Most of the rows have many narrow
columns, but one or two rows have a lesser number of
wider columns.  The existing layout manager has no idea
how to handle this AFAICT.

If you just express the wide element as:

     <text>
       <row>7</row>
       <col>3</col>
       <label>foofoofoofoobarbarbarbar</label>
     </text>

it will distort the width of its column, and distort the
width of the entire table.

You might be able to work around it by hand, e.g.

     <text>
       <halign>right</halign>
       <row>7</row>
       <col>3</col>
       <label>foofoofoofoo</label>
     </text>

     <text>
       <halign>left</halign>
       <row>7</row>
       <col>4</col>
       <label>barbarbarbar</label>
     </text>

but that doesn't look exactly right, and doesn't work for
properties (as opposed to static labels).  And it doesn't
generalize well to more than two columns.  And it doesn't
work for most halignments.

There is a simple way to express what is wanted, namely:

     <text>
       <row>7</row>
       <col>3</col>
       <col>5</col>
       <label>foofoofoofoobarbarbarbar</label>
     </text>

which means that the element is supposed to span from column
3 to column 5 inclusive.