At 12:42 PM -0800 on 2/28/00, Alain Farmer wrote:
>> Eric: I'm going to have to continue my UI paper
>> after hearing this. Drat. Was hoping to avoid it...
>
>Alain: Does your paper deal mainly with aesthetics, or
>is it focused on the knowledge-engineering aspects of
>GUI design? (ergonomie cognitive). The latter is what
>interests me the most.
It deals with usability and aesthetics. It's not a research paper or
anything, just more 'this is what I think, and why'. Calling it an
essay would perhaps be more appropriate.
>Alain: The OpenDoc answer to this question was really
>wild. The active components of the interface negotiate
>the actual output .. among themselves. An agent-based
>distributed-computing approach (new paradigm) that
>held tremendous potential .. but was unfortunately
>Steved in the Dark Years.
That would be an interesting way to do it. Anyone have some OpenDoc
docs lying around?
>> Eric: In principal, I agree that a solution
>> would be to test for the platform and
>> then set the button fonts appropriately.
>
>Alain: Ouch! A testing nightmare. The combinations and
>permutations are numerous, perhaps even infinite.
Not so bad when the testing can be done automaticly. Consider the
following font description:
Line height (maximal) is 16pts == 16/72in. == 2/9in.
Line height (upercase maximal) is 12pts == 12/72in. == 1/6in.
Width of string is 232pt == 3.5in
Font name is MadeUpFont => Class is Serif
An automated search can be performed with minimal built-in knowledge
(font class) to find an appropriate font. It may not be the "correct"
font, but it'll work. A user preference would determine if screen
resolution is taken into account -- if not, assume 72ppi, so 1pt == 1
pixel.
>Alain: Millimeters is a universal unit in desktop
>publishing!!! I don't think so.
Never said it was. But it's a universal unit everywhere except America.
>While their units and
>other terminology might seem arcane to us, I think
>that we should NOT under-estimate the usefulness of
>doing things the way typographers do them when it
>comes to handling fonts.
How about letting people do it as they please: You may enter sizes in
the unit of your choice. Even lightyears, if you happen to like
decimals a lot <g>. Internally, I guess we'd probably store it as the
OS's expect it -- points.
