Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
Indeed. We are mostly testing with english version. There captions
fits fine into designed width.
And the same issue appears for Afrikaans language as well. I've said it
before and I'll say it again. All modern GUI toolkits support layout
managers. These layout managers query each component and asks for the
preferred size and minimum size. Minimum size from all components will
dictate the minimum size of the dialog or form, so no clipping ever occurs.
The results only look nice when the forms have according flexible
layouts. In many cases it's not sufficient to only increase the size of
a single control, and to move following controls to the right. Such a
change should be reflected in *all* controls of the same "table". This
requires that all related controls are grouped properly, by placing them
into (kind of) VBox/HBox containers, or by anchoring.
In this context I really dislike the Lazarus anchored layout, because it
does not enforce a systematic "regular" layout. When controls are added
to a VBox/HBox, they are automatically alligned according to their
container. Anchors instead have to be set individually for every
control, with good chances for omissions, and without any chance of a
quick (visual) verification of the existing dependencies.
VCL is very outdated in this regard.
I dare to disagree. Using the appropriate containers (panels, probably
invisible) and anchors allows for the construction of very "elastic"
layouts, which can be verified by changing the form's size at design time.
LCL is slightly better with more
advanced alignment and sizing options, but a full layout manager support
is still missing.
The LCL anchors *allow* for more flexibility, but their use is a mess,
both in visual design (anchor editor) and in code (see anchor docking).
IMO they are nothing but a misfeature, violating the rule "keep it
simple" :-(
Even with the English language I often see captions
or groupboxes or labels being clipped, because those dialogs might have
been designed under Windows, but because GTK2 components are normally
larger, things don't fit.
For international development it were desireable to change the language
in the GUI at design time, in order to verify a constructed.
We should consider a major update of the layout handling in one of the
next versions, taking into account docking managers. As already
mentioned, a docking manager is more a layout manager, the issues with
dragging and docking are almost handled in the drag manager. The only
difference between an dock tree and other tree-style layout managers is
the distribution of the available or required space to the layout zones
or containers.
DoDi
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