> Sometimes we have a lot of work when porting an application to another
> system (even with the same OS).
>
> I have some knowledge on html, cascades stylesheets.
> I would like to have something similar to adapt a front panel design
> (maybe diagram, too). By strictly sepearting, style and content ewe
> could get much better design adaption to new tastes and/or systems. It
> should include styles for the fonts (font, size, coulour...) and scaling
> factors for the controls/indicators and a scaling factor for the
> placement of the controls/indicators. This should be availible in
> absolute sizes or in sizes relative to the screen resoulution.
>
> What do you think about this input?
Well there is a bit of this, some on fonts, some on color. There a
re
three symbolic fonts, Application, System, and Dialog wihch can be
modified and already constructed panels will update to the new font.
This solves some problems and causes others. If your dialog was layed
out with enough space originally, it is an easy way to make major font
changes. If you controls were packed or had other intricate
arrangement, it probably invalidated all of that since fonts aren't the
same size or aspect ratio.
The second place this happens is on colors. We have investigated having
custom palettes where you could change the palette colors and every
usage of the palette color would be updated quickly. It sounds cool in
theory, but in practice, it takes lots and lots of planning for this to
work for you.
The third, and primary way to make global changes is to use strict
typedefs. If you have many instances of an object to update, you can go
to the definition, change color or font, and apply to all controls.
Yeah, I know, this isn't as cool as
stylesheets, but to be honest, text
layout is a bit simpler and more rule based than 2D graphical layout.
We will keep it in mind though.
Greg McKaskle
