Subject: menu changed vertical spacing

From: Brad Giaccio <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:40:02 -0400

Dominik, something in your changes seems to have changed the vertical
spacing between menu items.  With really short menus the text looks
almost squished.  I checked the manpage but I didn't see anything under
MenuStyle that would apply.  HEre is my menustyle if you need it.

MenuStyle * mwm, \
    BorderWidth 1, \
    Foreground gray90, \
    Background #515178, \
    Greyed gray40, \
    ActiveFore Black, Hilight3DOff, \ 
    Animation, \
    Font -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-12-120-*-75-p-*-iso8859-1
ifelse(PLANES, 8, {
MenuStyle * MenuFace HGradient 8 #515178 #606078
}, {
MenuStyle * MenuFace HGradient 128 #515178 #000000
})  

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---

From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 18:44:30 -0600

On Tue, Jun 08, 1999 at 09:40:02AM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> MenuStyle that would apply.

That's an intentional change. I reduced the item height to the absolute minimum
with a gap of one pixel above and below the items. Is this a problem?

Bye

Dominik ^_^

-- 
Dominik Vogt, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Dept. BVS
Herrenberger Str.130, 71034 Boeblingen, Germany
phone: 07031/14-4596, fax: 07031/14-3883, [email-masked]
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---

From: Brad Giaccio <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:59:08 -0400

On Tue, Jun 08, 1999 at 06:44:30PM -0600, Dominik Vogt wrote:

> > Dominik, something in your changes seems to have changed the
> > vertical spacing between menu items.  With really short menus the
> > text looks almost squished.  I checked the manpage but I didn't see
> > anything under MenuStyle that would apply.
>
> That's an intentional change. I reduced the item height to the
> absolute minimum with a gap of one pixel above and below the items. Is
> this a problem?
>

Well to my eye the menus look awfully squished on 1280x1024 display.  I
suppose I can become acustom to it, unless its someplace in the code I
can change easilly.

Brad

---

From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 00:52:50 +0200

> suppose I can become acustom to it, unless its someplace in the code I

I have increased the space by one pixel again. Does it look better now?
All parameters to modify the menu looks are very easy to change now
(that was one of the main goals behind the menu drawing rewrite). Look
at menus.c. At the start of the file you will find lots of #defines
controlling nearly all spacing values (except the ones that can be
configured anyway). The ones you would want to change are

  /* gap above item text */
  #define ITEM_TEXT_Y_OFFSET        0
  /* gap below item text */
  #define ITEM_TEXT_Y_OFFSET2       2

Note that when you wrote your mail the second offset was 1.

Bye

Dominik ^_^

--
Dominik Vogt, [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
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---

From: Greg Badros <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Jun 1999 16:13:21 -0700

> configured anyway). The ones you would want to change are

Well, "very easy to change" is relative.  Preprocessor substitutions are 
easy to change at compile time, but that's incredibly hard to change at
run-time (or if you're only given a binary, which is unfortunately
becoming more and more often the case, esp. as binary rpm and other
packaging formats gain popularity).

One of the fundamental problems I think fvwm2 still suffers from is
*way* too much compile time configurability of things that should be run 
time configurable.  E.g., the spacing of menus is clearly something
where different users will likely have different preferences;  you don't 
want to have to build different binaries for different users, so those
values need to be run time parameters, not compile time #defines.  It's
easy enough to make values run-time configurable, and I'm surprised it's 
done so infrequently.

Run time options are also far better for testing than compile time
defines and conditional compilation directives;  imagine having to build 
all the different versions of the source code to be sure there wasn't a
path through conditional compilation directives that was going to cause
problems.  Too much preprocessor is a disaster!

Greg

---

From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:26:22 -0600

> packaging formats gain popularity).

I never intended the user to change the vertical spacing at all (and
neither the horizontal spacing, it's a byproduct of the ItemFormat).

> easy enough to make values run-time configurable, and I'm surprised it's 

Come on, I can't do *everything*. You should know menus.c from 2.0.46 well
enough to know it was a mess (in general and refering to the drawing
code as well). Constants numbers (I'm not talking about macros) were
scattered all over the file. Getting to the present state took me
4 full days, spell *thirtytwo hours*. And the result is that nearly
all numbers influencing the placement and look of the menus *can* be
changed in a single place. Just take the border width that was hard coded
to 2 pixels before.  There were about twenty places where it was used, and
often you didn't even know why (you can't imagine the amount of bugs in
the drawing code I found). Now there are about fifteen macros for
menu drawing and I could easily think of a few more. I really don't
want to bloat fvwm with fifteen new options that nobody except me is
able to use (and in half a year I'll have forgotten what they do exactly).

> problems.  Too much preprocessor is a disaster!

Yes. I'd like to take out most of the configure options too. I think most
of them don't work properly anyway if switched off.

Bye

Dominik ^_^