[PD] How do you do this? GUI and GOP questions

[Matthew Allen]

So in the last 3 weeks or so I've been able to really sit and work on trying
to get a couple of my abstractions to the point where I could post them. 

One of the things GUI wise I've been struggling with is how to represent a
list of symbols that the user can choose, a quick example would be having a
user choose between  7 lengths of a step sequncer (2 steps, 4 steps, 6
steps, etc). I have been using hradio and vradio, but I need labels to
appear on a GOP. My work around for this was to create Canvas objects of
unit tall and place them along the vradio:

#N canvas 0 0 452 302 10;
#X obj 153 110 vradio 15 1 0 4 empty empty empty 0 -6 0 8 -262144 -1
-1 0;
#X obj 153 125 cnv 15 60 1 empty empty 2_step 20 -8 0 8 -1 -1 0;
#X obj 153 140 cnv 15 60 1 empty empty 4_step 20 -8 0 8 -1 -1 0;
#X obj 153 155 cnv 15 60 1 empty empty 6_step 20 -8 0 8 -1 -1 0;
#X obj 153 170 cnv 1 60 1 empty empty 8_step 20 -8 0 8 -1 -1 0;

What do other people do to label H and Vradios for GOP's? 

This is fine for small lists, but really large ones (say 16 or greater) this
becomes unmanageable. And as a more general question how do people deal with
letting a user select a long list of symbols? I have a step sequencer I have
been building and adding to for a while, that lets me select from 4 banks
(labelled A-D) of 16 patterns. For doing things like morphing from one
patern to another or other weird stuff I would really like to be able to
have the user select A12 and D8 as opposed to 12 and 56 which will certainly
confuse the new user.

thanks
m.