Re: [XBoard-devel] next release

[h.g. muller]

At 19:37 29-9-2011 -0700, Arun Persaud wrote:
> > The easiest fix  would be to let tinyLayout start at -size 40 in stead
> > of 25.
>
> I would vote for this quick fix or leaving it as it is (doesn't look too
> bad on my computer)... another fix could be to center the board under
> the menu in case the menu is longer than the board... might look a better?!

Well, centering the board is unfortunately difficult in Xt. You would have 
to calculate
the offset from the left edge by hand, and the fix no longer qualifies as easy.

An additional complication that I overlooked upto now is that the 
tinyLayout decision
should really be taken based on board width rather than square size. E.g. 
-size 29
would not be a problem at all in Gothic Chess, where the board is 10x8.
But I could do something like

tinyLaout = (BOARD_WIDTH * (squareSize+lineGap) <  8*42);

This would then work with the default font settings. Come to think of it, 
there actually
might already be code in XBoard to calculate the width of the menu bar, because
it must layout things such that the message widget and button bar together have
exactly the same length. In that case I could replace the 8*42 by the 
actual length,
which would then take into account the font that is used (and a possible 
translation!)

> I think reorganizing the menus might be a good idea, but I rather would
> do that when we do a new major release or even better when we change to
> GTK. As for the menu problem with GTK we will have SVG pieces and will
> be able to freely rescale the window, so we can get rid of fixed sizes
> anyway in which case we would need to rethink again what we will do when
> the menu gets longer than the window, so I think it's better to wait
> with that...

I largely agree with that. I did play a little with the board scaling in 
the GTK-Xt
version, as that did not work properly yet for non-8x8 boards, but it is a 
complex
problem to define what the desired behavior is. E.g. should we scale the clocks
to a bigger font when the board gets wider because of a switch to Courier Chess
(on 12x8 board). Or should the fonts be tied to square size, rather than 
board size?
Or perhaps a geometric average of the two? In WinBoard the fonts (and as a
consequence the height of the stuff above the board) would be kept constant
for a given square size, but I admit that this especially makes the clocks look
puny in Gothic (let alone Courier). So perhaps it would be better to pick the
clock font based on squareSize * sqrt(BOARD_WIDTH/8.0); The message font
could still be picked basedon square size only.