Re: Text label mis-sizing / clipping

[Adrian Robert]

> > > One minor annoyance I've experienced on GNUstep so far is the fact
> > > that text labels often cut off the text they contain.
> >
> > I have noticed this myself in many apps and it is quite annoying.
> > Also hoping for an answer.
> I noticed it in PRICE as well, which I write myself. The problem seems 
> that anti-aliased stuff takes up too much space. Since I usually 
> design on a system without it. Also some slight font size differences 
> make it appear. Often I could solve it by giving in Gorm just 1-2 
> pixel more horizontally to the text box and so making it more 
> flexible.

Still, I wonder why the problem only seems to affect some widgets.  
Does anyone ever encounter a problem with the "Box" widget?  I've never 
seen a problem here, nor with a menu being too narrow.  Drop-down 
selector widgets, despite being similar to menus, DO show the issue 
though.

I have no programming experience with AppKit, but here is a rough set 
of possible explanations, assuming that in every case the designer of 
the app is seeing properly-sized labels on their screen:

  1) there is no system in place for application to specify a required 
font size and runtime to heed it (I doubt this but it is here for 
completeness)

  2) application is not specifying the font size it requires in 
sufficient detail, or is specifying it incorrectly.. (for example, 
reality is that asking for "10pt" will get you something smaller in 
Times than in most other fonts, regardless of what "point" means 
historically)

  3) application is specifying sufficiently and correctly but runtime 
system is supplying fonts violating the size request, without printing 
a warning; this could be due either to:

    a) problems with the font information available to the runtime 
(system fonts are not catalogued / measured properly)

    b) problems in the runtime itself (it is not correctly interpreting 
and comparing system font information with the font request, or it is 
not accessing the lower-level scaling APIs correctly)

    c) simple lack of fonts on user system and/or inability to properly 
access scaling architecture, and not printing of a warning through 
oversight

None of these reasons really explains why the problem should be as 
widget-specific as it seems to be.  Perhaps it is the case that some 
widgets, like Box and Menus, do auto-layout at runtime, whereas the 
others must or tend to be set to do static sizing?  If this is the 
case, then some variants of 3a are eliminated, since clearly the 
correct font metrics are available at some level to gnustep.