[PD] GOP text field / symbol which is resizeable?

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 07/02/2013 06:54 AM, András Murányi wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com 
> <mailto:reduzent at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Mon, 2013-07-01 at 20:56 +0200, András Murányi wrote:
>     > I'm reformulating my question as the problem is evolving:
>     > do we have an object that
>     > - Displays and holds a text value (like Symbol or Message box),
>
>     * symbolbox with width set 0 resizes dynamically
>     * hsl, vsl, cnv, etc. can adjust size with 'size' message, can change
>     displayed text with 'label' message
>
>
> Very good idea, thanks Roman!
> Some difficulties I'm having:
> - I don't know how to set the label of [cnv]... is it possible at all?
> - (ATTN: Ivica) [hsl] seems to have the bounding box (?) miscalculated 
> in l2ork so it doesn't GOP when it's less than 2-3px from the border 
> of the parent canvas. Checked in Vanilla, it works as expected ([hsl] 
> can be placed to the very border and it will GOP).
>
>
>     > - is Graph-on-Parent,
>

If you start with an auto-resizable widget or iemgui label that takes an
arbitrary string you probably don't want to combine it with a fixed-width
geometry manager (geometry unmanager?) like a GOP canvas.

You'll have to resize the width of the GOP box manually,
which means you have to listen for changes to the string length of the label
and _guess_ at how many pixels that translates to.  If you guess wrong (and
given that different OSes do fonts differently you will guess wrong) it 
will break.
Every modern GUI toolkit (even tk) assumes that the developer doesn't 
want to
worry about these problems, or at least assume they only want to control 
them
at a much higher level.

For some context:
Pd's diagrams actually break all the time: whenever patch authors set
up objects so that the wires to/from a secondary xlet are either 
straight or at
45-degree angles.  Those lines may not be at the same angle on someone 
else's
machine, because of font rendering peculiarities on the OS or specific 
font settings
that user has made.  The breakage can actually introduce ambiguities 
that aren't
there on the original author's machine, but most of the time these 
breakages just
degrade the diagram gracefully-- you get not-quite-straight lines that 
don't look
as aesthetically pleasing but the patch is fully functional/editable.

If your iemgui label or symbol box on a GOP canvas goes over the 
allotted pixel
width of the GOP rectangle you lose functionality because the object no 
longer moves
with the GOP canvas.  If you're making a one-off GUI for your own 
purposes this
may be fine, but if you're trying to make a reusable abstraction, don't 
combine
auto-resizing widgets with geometry-unmanagers.  They don't degrade 
gracefully,
and the pitfalls aren't trivial to see unless you stream the patch to 
three different
OSes at the same time and watch the differences.

-Jonathan
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