Re: [lmi] [PATCH] Skin appearance improvements

[Greg Chicares]

On 2016-07-01 18:36, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 16:28:54 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> GC> Here's an odd thing I notice, either with or without this patch.
> GC> When I first open the tabbed dialog, the "Policy" listbox is
> GC> narrow: perhaps thirty pixels wide. If I change the dialog's size
> GC> in either dimension, the width grows to perhaps fifty pixels; it
> GC> retains that width if I resize the dialog again.
> 
>  I don't see quite the same behaviour: when I create a new illustration
> using the single premium skin, the listbox is initially _wider_ than it
> becomes after resizing (it's ~140px wide initially and ~80px wide later).

How can that be: I see it grow, while you see it shrink? Is it because
I'm using 192 DPI and you're using a default 96?

>  To really fix this problem, I think something needs to be done at lmi
> level. First idea is to apply a very simple fix at XRC level: just change
> the size of the listbox to use something like
> 
>       <size>50,-1d</size>
> 
> to make the listbox sufficiently wide (50 dialog units is ~12 characters).
> This works and I honestly don't see many drawbacks to doing this, but is
> not particularly elegant.

We have hard-coded sizes elsewhere in various '.xrc' files, so I think
this is all right.

I've determined that a width of 90 looks best to me at 192 DPI; should
I code it as
  <size>90,-1d</size>
or should I be using dialog units instead? I know we've discussed this
before, but I've re-read everything on this mailing list that contains
the string "dialog unit" and I'm still unsure. This documentation:
  
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/overview_xrcformat.html#overview_xrcformat_type_size
says that "90" above represents DPI-independent pixel units. I want
DPI independence, especially because I use a different DPI setting
than most or all end users, so wouldn't I always want <size> values
without the 'd' suffix?

BTW, why did you suggest
>       <size>50,-1d</size>
above, with 'd' only on the second element? AIUI, '-1' is special
anyway, with the meaning "unspecified", so are '-1' and '-1d'
actually different? I'm particularly curious because our XRC code
uses 'd' only with '-1':

/lmi/mirror/lmi[0]$grep 'size>.*d.*</size' *.xrc
skin_coli_boli.xrc:                                        <size>30,-1d</size>
skin_coli_boli.xrc:                                        <size>30,-1d</size>