Re: [XBoard-devel] next release

[h.g. muller]

At 12:59 28-9-2011 -0700, Arun Persaud wrote:
> ... anything else?

Well, I was checking things, and encountered the following problem in XBoard:
For board sizes (-size) 29, 33, 37, and 40 the menu bar is now wider than 
the board,
bacause the new menu organization has more items than it used to have.
This means the menu bar will determine the width of the window in those sizes,
leaving lots of white space to the right of the board, which is truly ugly.
At -size 25 the problem disappears, because XBoard switches to so-called
tinyLayout, where it only putsthe first letter on the menu names on the 
menu bar.

Should we still do something about this for 4.5.3? And if so, what?
The easiest fix  would be to let tinyLayout start at -size 40 in stead of 25.
This gives many sizes where we only have single-letter menu titles, though.
An alternative would be to change the default point size of the -messageFont.
(This could be acheived by changing the default fonts table in the code, as 
well
as by configuring defaults in the xboard.config file.) With 11 point in 
stead of 12,
for instance, -sizes 37 and 40 would be OK. The font would also be used in the
pull-down menu itself, though, which makes them look a bit sparse to my taste.
Finally we could reconsider the new menu organization, e.g. dissolve the Engine
menu and move the items to Action and Options, or merge Action and Mode.
This would mean a major change to the code, though.