Re: Text label mis-sizing / clipping

[Gregory John Casamento]

See below..

--- Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> wrote:

> > > Also, while Gorm could perhaps be modified to
> >> enforce the needed generous sizing automatically,
> >
> > 2. is easily done in Gorm by using Vera Sans as the system font when 
> > designing.
> 
> Currently, you must set the display font for Gorm itself to do this.  
> This is because Gorm designs the interface using the same font defaults 
> as it is running with itself; but it does not store this config info in 
> the nib.  

This is somewhat incorrect. :)   The GUI classes encode font data using the
NSFont class which uses either explicit settings or system settings to
determine which fonts should be used.  "System" fonts are resolved at run time
to be whatever the user has set in his/her preferences.

If you explicity set the font to Vera-Sans, then on other people's machine it
will look for vera sans when the archive is read.   If you set one of the
default fonts, it will attempt to load and use this.

> If (2) is going to be a primary solution it would be nice to 
> have Gorm use the default font size of 12 (and perhaps set family to 
> something like the 'Vera Sans') in the interface design window(s) 
> regardless of what setting it happens to be running with.  (Or make 
> this the default value for a global or project prefs setting.)  You 
> could then use your preferred font settings to work in Gorm and still 
> develop standard interfaces.
> 
> Failing this, then Gorm should perhaps just ignore any user font 
> settings; I think it is too much to ask that developers execute various 
> defaults gymnastics just to get a Gorm that will design standard 
> interfaces.. most people want to spend minimal time on laying out 
> panels and just get down to the model and control code, and the whole 
> philosophy of having Gorm is that you can do this.
> 
> 
> > (Note that you could achieve something similar manually by just 
> > setting the NSFontSize default.)
> 
> I did some experimentation and it turns out that most applications 
> respond only partially to this default, presumably because they have 
> some font sizes specified manually.  In addition, Gorm itself 
> encourages this in certain cases, because the text label widget 
> displayed as 'Title' on the widget palette specifies its font manually, 
> as far as I can tell to system font family, size=14.  

This should likely be changed to the bold system font.   You are, however, free
to change the size or setting however you like by opening the font panel and
changing the setting.   Gorm does not lock you into the 14 pt size for the
Title.

> If you design an 
> interface using this widget (in fact most panels use it somewhere), 
> then these widgets do not respond to NSFontSize.  In addition, it is 
> supposed to be used for heading text, as the word "Title" implies, but 
> since there is no other general-purpose label widget, most people use 
> it as a label as well.  I suggest that this widget be removed from the 
> palette and a set of 3 or 4 that use the system fonts be put in 
> instead, as Apple's IB does (in 10.3; screenshot attached, see bottom 
> right).

I will take a look and the screenshot you've attached and consider it.   Thanks
for the input.   If it has some merit, I will add it to the palette. :)

> 

> ATTACHMENT part 2 image/png x-mac-type=504E4766; x-unix-mode=0644;
x-mac-creator=70727677; name=ibPalette.png
> 
> 
> A typical illustration of use of 'Title' as a label exists in 
> CodeEditor's preferences pane (attached), where the 'seconds' and 
> 'lines' are in this size-14 "Title" font and the other text, part of 
> NSButton, is in system font.
> 
> 

> ATTACHMENT part 4 image/png x-unix-mode=0644; name=codeEditorPrefs.png
> 
> 
> I don't mean any of the above to sound like I'm bashing Gorm by the way 
> -- if it wasn't such an excellent, complete implementation we would be 
> complaining about far less trivial things than font sizes...
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> 

Thanks, GJC

=====
Gregory John Casamento 
-- CEO/President Open Logic Corp. (A Maryland Corporation)
#### Maintainer of Gorm for GNUstep.