Rich, Here are a few rules of thumb regarding the use of layout managers and their effects on contained components:
Flow- puts as many components as possible into the first row, remaining components are placed on second etc. rows. All components are spaced evenly and centered by default but you can change that to right or left as well. In any case, the preferred size (note, not what you necc. set it) of a component is ALWAYS honored. Grid- Ignores the preferred size of a component. The panel (or whatever) is simply divided into x number of rows and y number of columns. Each row and col will be the same size. Every component added will be the same size and they are added left to right, row by row. Border- It sometimes honors the preferred size of a component. The panel (or whatever) is divided into 5 regions: North, South, East, West and Center. Each can contain only 1 component. The preferred height of a component is honored in the North and South regions and the component expands horizontally to fill the whole region. East and West are the opposite. The preferred width of components are honored but height is not. Components expand vertically. Center is whatever that is left over from the other parts. Card- Sort of like the old HyperCard stacks. Again, sort of. You add components which resize to fill their container, then basically hide/show various components. Gridbag- The hardest but most powerful. You can lay components out pretty much where you want them but it takes a lot of effort. The beauty is that it still looks good when rendered on various systems. Null- You can always set the layout to "null" and use absolute positioning but this is a VERY bad idea as your GUI will not be very cross-platform viewable. -Dev -- Dev Brown Morrisville, NC USA "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." Humanitarian and poet, Joseph Stalin _______________________________________________ Juglist mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
