[Kalzium] Kalzium atom labels

[Benoit Jacob]

On Mon, 21 May 2007, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have updated the avogadro label engine to be configurable using the avogadro
> system.

Very good!

> I chatted with Donald briefly on IRC and he was saying we could add
> that widget to the kalzium display. I got halfway through doing that before I
> realised it would break the gridlayout and stopped myself.

Breaking the grid layout is not a big deal by itself. What's important is 
to keep the Kalzium UI clean and simple. If the labelengine configuration 
widget is as simple as the current Kalzium labelsCombo, then of course I'm 
all for using it!

> I think what we have now works pretty well but it will probably have to change
> in future. Ideally kalzium would reuse libavogadro's configuration widgets
> but we could always reimplement some of this stuff if necessary. Part of it
> is presenting a consistent ui. Is there an easy way to pass a widget to the
> engine and say - this is your combo box for label type?

I don't know: I really have zero experience with GUI programming. I was 
thinking, the labelengine has to have a slot anyway, say "setStyle". 
Ideally we would like to tell the dialog to connect the combobox's signal 
to that slot. I don't know if that's possible since the dialog does only 
know about the GLWidget, not about the engines. Conversely the engines 
only know about the GLWidget, not about the dialog. That's why, as a 
temporary dirty solution for Kalzium, I added a GLWidget::setLabels slot. 
I really don't know what to do here.

> I also wasn't sure about adding a spacer below the two goup boxes to keep them
> at the top as the window expands. This could be quite a subjective thing but
> I would prefer them to remain more static.

Sure, please do! I have been wanting to do exactly that, but as I'm very 
bad at using Designer, I didn't manage it!

Other things while we're at it:

1. it should be possible to somehow grant the GLWidget 100% of the dialog 
width. When the vertical splitter is dragged to the left, it should 
initially "resist", but if the dragging goes far enough to the left it 
should yield. I don't know how to do that but that sure is doable since 
that was the former behavior before I broke everything.

2. The current width and height of the comboboxes and their labels is fine 
with my font size, and with the current untranslated strings. What will 
happen if some user uses a larger font, or has i18n'd strings in a 
language that is less concise than English (like French) ? We need to make 
sure the comboboxes and other controls have their width automatically 
adapted. Well, I guess that's a very common issue in GUI design, so there 
must be a trivial solution.

Cheers,
Benoit