Top level menu spacers [was: Re: [Gnustep-cvs] r27911 ...]

[David Ayers]

Am Freitag, den 27.02.2009, 09:24 +0000 schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald:
> On 27 Feb 2009, at 09:03, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> 
> > I am not sure about the separator items. I fully agree that they don't
> > look great in our current drawing style. But the idea of structuring
> > even a vertical a menu seems correct to me. We could try to replace  
> > the
> > separator item drawing with something that just displays a vertical or
> > horizontal line, this will make the menu item size computation a bid
> > harder, but surely looks a lot better.
> >
> > Now we have two differing opinions. How to proceed from here? Are  
> > there
> > any other points of view out there?
> 
> On the issue of spacers ... I think we need to keep the spacer items  
> in the menu so that we retain all the information about them and can  
> therefore switch between horizontal and vertical layouts repeatedly  
> and consistently.  However, horizontal and vertical menus should draw  
> them differently of course.  A simple option would just be for the  
> drawing code to treat the as if they don't exist when drawing a  
> vertical menu ... ie make them occupy zero space on screen.  Visually  
> this would probably be best.

I agree that spacers at the top level (actually independent of whether
vertical or horizontal layout) are unexpected to me.  

Yet I'm not sure whether they should categorically be disabled, or
whether they could be tagged as automatically merged by the layout
engine and only automatically disable their display when they are thus
tagged.  This would allow explicit spacers to remain.  [I'm not sure
whether it's really worth the work but I just wanted you to consider
it.]

Now the rendering of top-level spacers should probably be a theme hook.
And as long as we have the NeXTstep UI as default, maybe someone could
check what top-level spacers looked like in OPENSTEP.

Cheers,
David