Re: [MACTCL] Menubutton and Checkbutton width wrong on MacOS X

[Adrian R. <adr...@gm...>]

I think if it's possible for Tk to support a widget option consistently across platforms it should do its best to do so.  What is or isn't best programming practice is one thing, but the API is kind of like a contract, that allows cross-platform applications to be written without the need for a lot of if-then's to handle different environments.

This is why when ttk was added, the approach was to provide a more minimal set of configuration options for each widget, to ensure that it could be adhered to for each platform, rather than providing a bigger set of which parts might or might not work in a given environment.


-Adrian



On 2012/11/28, at 11:07, Kevin Walzer <kw...@co...> wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> On 11/26/12 4:31 PM, Russell E. Owen wrote:
>> 
>> Would it be OK to change Tcl/Tk so that the width option on these
>> widgets actually does specify roughly how many chars could be displayed?
>> Its a simple change, though admittedly one that requires a Mac-specific
>> branch. I guess an obvious question is how widely others are already
>> hacking around this issue. (I assume most users use width=0 and thus
>> don't see this bug).
> 
> I would appreciate others weighing in on this.
> 
> As I've commented to Russell at the bug report, my view is that  what 
> he's seeing is not a bug but simply the platform-specific 
> implementation, i.e. Cocoa may simply calculate text width and render it 
> a bit differently than did Carbon. (Carbon used QuickDraw and then ATSUI 
> for its text rendering, while Cocoa uses CoreText.) If he does not use 
> hard-coded widths then the text displays fine, although it may change 
> the layout of his app.
> 
> My understanding is that it's not considered a best practice in Tk to 
> hard-code text widths and font sizes, because font rendering can vary so 
> widely across platforms: what looks good on one platform may look quite 
> different (and not so good) on another. My limited experience with 
> deploying a Tk app on Windows confirms this.
> 
> I'm reluctant to go against the platform-specific grain and investigate 
> a change that would preserve cross-platform compatibility at the expense 
> of best practices on the specific platform, cf. how other Cocoa-based 
> apps do it. I'm especially reluctant to do so (and not even sure it can 
> be done) given that Russell has found a workaround for his use case.
> 
> Other opinions are welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kevin
> 
> 
> -- 
> Kevin Walzer
> Code by Kevin
> http://www.codebykevin.com
> 
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