On Fri, 26 Mar 1999, Frank de Lange wrote:
[...]
> On another front, I'd like the GTK-port to be able to use Gnome if present, but
> it should not depend on it. A small question lingers in my mind: how free are
> we to create our own dialog structure?
The only limitations that the gui independence work is placing on
popups is that there must be an object in the frontend to receive each of
the signals in the Popups class. At present these objects all have names
specified by the xforms port and we will be able to work around that if
need be. The xforms port uses one object per popup.
> I created a (rudimentary, only GUI stuff without real functionality)
> tabbed notebook for all Layout properties (Character, Paragraph,
> Document, Paper & Quotes), in contrast to KLyX's (and Lyx's) separate
> dialogs for all these items.
In this case we could easily support this scheme. All you'd have to do is
connect appropiate methods to the showFormDocument and showFormParagraph
and so on signals. That way when a particular signal is activated your
frontend would then open the combined popup to the appropriate tabbed
notebook page.
> but maybe the general consensus is to keep Lyx's interface consistent
> among GUI toolkits? If not, I'm all for cleaning up the interface a
> bit, bundling related things in notebooks and such.
There has been some moves in this direction already with the combination
of a few document level things with the document popup and transformed
that into a tabbed popup. Paragraph is also a tabbed popup but needs more
work -- such as adding per-paragraph spacing and itemize bullets for
example.
I'm inclined to keep the Character, Paragraph and Document scope stuff in
separate popups because it should be less confusing for a user that way.
It does however lead to possible redundant implementations of common
gui code but we should be able to get around that.
Any cleanup of the interface is welcome though and good ideas will almost
certainly trickle through to the other ports. Another important point to
remember is that there will have to be some major revisions to several of
the existing popups (SpellChecker springs to mind) and addition of new
popups like the Preferences (lyxrc editting).
Allan. (ARRae)
