Hi David,
I absolutely agree with you; if there's room for improvement in the WE scripting design, the XML dialogs and the problem you mention are certainly one of the most obvious places to start. I had a dialog within the last few weeks which was generating an editbox (even though set to multiple lines) which was only displaying roughly 3 words per line. It was very frustrating. I was only able to determine this by use of the mouse cursor. I could not get the XML to make it any larger without guessing at dialog unit numbers, which I was reluctant to do. I don't know for certain that my solution is any better, but what I did was to add the controls to the dialog which allowed it to be resized; and then I tried to define all my groups and my editbox using "fill" as the width or height as appropriate. Finally, I added a maximize command in the dialog event handler when the dialog is being created (for the dialog's window). This solved my issue and caused an editbox which seemed to display a large amount of text, as judged with the mouse cursor. I'm not sure what would make this better for blind developers, but perhaps a parameter for editboxes which allowed us to specify a minimum width and minimum height in characters would be a good start. The XML dialog routines could then try to create an editbox as close to our specified size of the time as was possible, as opposed to whatever they are doing right now (which I'm guessing is just filling up the group). HTH, Chip From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 7:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: XML question - How many units? When creating an XML dialog, holding an Edit box, I want to enter a number for the hight and width. Big question is, how high can that number be, and still fit inside a window on a normal basis. I.e, is there any way to calculate this, or is it a simple hit and miss. Specially when designing dialogs as a blind person, I find it hard to know whether a line or text block will fit into the window. My experience has been, that WE will read the whole line, even if the line is being cut off on the screen. Could there have been a method or something in the GWToolkit, that would take a string, and return an approximate number for the hight or width. I am not too familiar with the screen units being used in this regard, but my guess is that one unit might vary, depending on current font and size. Am I right on this one? If so, I do understand there might be a challenge in giving the exact number for the maximum hight and width to be used for a given text to be displayed in an Edit box, but that is why, I ask that the calculation at least could give some kind of an approximate - or suggested number. I found little help in browsing the reference manual on the matter, but maybe I was overlooking something. Or, does anyone of you blind app developers, have a good way of testing whether a dialog is properly designed. Thanks for any feedback.
