HIG; dialogs and layouts.

[Robert Knight]

> I've found that the proposed alignment is pretty darn hard to do in Qt
> Designer

How difficult would it be to fix Qt Designer itself?


On 03/04/07, Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> wrote:
> Last week Ellen posted an update on the way they HCI people wanted to make
> clear how we should do layout of dialogs; see
> http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2745
>
> I've found that the proposed alignment is pretty darn hard to do in Qt
> Designer.  Doing right align is one thing; but aligning the items in
> multiple
> groupboxes is a lot harder to do properly.
> So, I had an idea;  do this programmatically using a visitor which traverses
> all the widgets.
>
> I added a class in KOffice libs to do just that. It takes a 'normal' dialog
> as
> we have been creating them in KDE3 for ages and adds alignments / minimum
> sizes to get the wanted results. Note that it is even capable of aligning
> the
> columns across tabs. ;)
>
> Now; here is my question to k-c-d.
> I need the proper coordinates of the (layouted) widgets to do the job, to
> determine what should line up and what not.  Prior to showing the dialog
> widgets don't have a coordinate. Some are at 0,0
> In fact; even on the showEvent of the dialog widgets that are in a nested
> layout have coordinates 0,0
>
> I ended up with a singleshot in the KPageDialog inheriting class which is
> called from the viewEvent().
> This has 2 nasty side effects;
> 1) I need to add some 10 lines to each dialog to do this 'trick'.
> 2) The layout jumps due to being layouted twice. Hardly noticeable, but
> still.
>
> We could move this to KDialog to avoid the first problem, but I see no
> solution for the second problem.
>
> Thoughts, ideas, flames, praise?
>
> See;
> http://members.home.nl/zander/images/layoutvisitor-indent-spacing.png
> and after;
> http://members.home.nl/zander/images/layoutvisitor-indent-spacing-after.png
>
> Another one;
> http://members.home.nl/zander/images/layoutvisitor-pageLayout.png
> and after;
> http://members.home.nl/zander/images/layoutvisitor-pageLayout-after.png
>
> The class;
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/koffice/libs/kofficeui/KoLayoutVisitor.h?view=log
> --
> Thomas Zander
>