Re: [XBoard-devel] new developer release

[h.g. muller]

I tried out the download for WinBoard (OK) and XBoard, when built in a 
virgin directory.
The result for XBoard unfortunately looks awful. The browse buttons in the 
dialogs are
so high that they overlap with the next line. I never had that before, but 
after building the
new one, my old binary had this problem too. (Byrial complained about this 
earlier,
but so far I never succeeded in reproducing it.)

Turns out it was the settingsfile specifying fonts that masked this problem 
for me, so far.
For testing the developer release, I renamed the old user settings file 
(~/.xboardrc) to get
it out of the way. And that makes the look quite different: text is 
apparently supposed to
be much higher, and this is obvious from the spacing in the menus and the 
height of buttons.
I suppose it figures that it must be large enough to accomodate Chinese...

Problem is that the text widgets do not scale similarly, (and I don't know 
why). As the dialog
layout is determined by spacing the text-edits with respect to each other, 
the buttons
will overflow into the next line.

I fixed this by getting the height of the board-window message widget 
(which is a label
widget, which apparently gets the same height as a button), and request 
that height for the
text edits too. This restores the layout of the dialogs, but makes the 
text-edits too large
for the text. And unlike buttons, they don't center the text, but v-align 
it to top. I guess they
do this because they don't realize that the text will never be multi-line. 
I could bot find a
way to center it vertically. So it looks a bit weird, but not as bad as 
overlapping buttons,
and it functions.

Due to the large widget height the checkboxes in the dialogs were displayed 
too much
above the label texts (they v-aling with the top of the following label 
widget, and have a
quite small hight to begin with. So I moved them down by defining a dummy 
borderless
label widget above them. (I did not know another way.)

This works, but perhaps the opposite strategy (force the button / label 
heights to that of the
text-edits, rather than vice versa) would have given a better result. It 
could break proper
operation in other languages, though, e.g. Chinese, so I did not dare to do it.

Anyway, I pushed a flood of commits to Savannah-master. Apart from the 
layout there
were some configuring problems as well (masked so far by my settings file): 
the textures
need explicit switching on, and not having the -firstChessProgramNames 
initialized
exposed a bug (crash) in comboboxes, which could not handle empty menus. So now
I configured a list with 4 engines in the xboard.conf master file, and also 
fixed the crash.

I also made some additions to the WinBoard translation template file, and 
the Dutch
translation.

Given that so much is wrong already, wouldn't it be better to immediately 
make a new
developer release / new tar ball with all this fixed?