[Ongui-dev] Progress

[Mike D. <mi...@cs...>]

Hi Robin,

> It's *interesting* why you can't get text to display.

Well, interesting problem #1 was "really really small text". I was
calling pango_font_description_set_size(blah, 12) to try to get a
12-point font. I eventually solved this (experimentally) by using
size=12000.

Followup research reveals that the size which
pango_font_description_set_size() takes is in "pango units." There are
PANGO_SCALE pango units in one device unit (a point in my case). And,
drum roll please, PANGO_SCALE is defined as 1024.

So, a case of the RTFMs. Sigh.

In any case, I'm back on track. I have dirty code which displays a
label in a window. Stuff which needs to get worked out in the
near-term, I think, in no particular order:
 * size management (request/allocation cycle)
 * event handling (which I haven't even started)
 * layout management

So, some questions for you:

1) Base widget class? All widgets will have to do size requisition and
   allocation, as well as some GDK resource management.
2) For now, I'm going to use a global function to process
   events. Going forward, though, do you intend for the top level
   containers to have a member method for this purpose? And how will
   this interact with threading?
3) Layout classes: coming from a GTK+ background, I think in terms of
   bins, hboxes, vboxes and "fixed position" containers, each with
   various packing and padding options. This, I think, is a little
   unwieldy at times. I'm familiar with other layout models, but I
   haven't used anything else enough to form an opinion. Do you have a
   particular philosophical bent on this?

> I want to have a developer mode I can activate to do on-the-fly
> GUI-building inside a live app.

Ah, the holy grail of GUI toolkits. This is exciting stuff. At my last
job, I spent some time pondering this sort of functionality. So when
we get to that point, I hope to be able to contribute.

Thanks,

-mike