xrc Fonts / resizing

This is moved from pgadmin-support to hackers.

Mark A. Taff wrote:

>Andreas, are you talking about something like wxMatrixSizer as described at:
>
>http://wxworkshop.sourceforge.net/matrixx/default.html
>
No. In fact, this is what I want to avoid technically and by it's bad
look. The last example is just worse case for me.

>
>I can appreciate that you want this fixed The Right Way(tm).  I am the same
>way when it comes to stuff I do.  And I can certainly appreciate the beauty
>of having wxWindows automatically resize and re-layout dialogs based on font
>properties.  However, I am in the position where I _have_ to change all the
>.xrc files to make pgadmin3 usable on my machine.
>
>Do you have another solution to making the dialogs usable on my machine other
>than rewriting the .xrc files?  I've been at this for a month of my spare
>time (granted, my spare time is rather limited), and I haven't come across
>any other workable solutions.
>
I've been investigating a little, and what's coming is this:

The dialogs *need* some redesign, because currently they are designed in
pixels, while they should be designed in dialog units. Originally, I was
quite sure we already did, but unfortunately we failed.

Redesigning means recalculating all sizes and positions, and adding a 'd'.
All widths have to be multiplied by 4/6, and all heights by 8/13, thus
200x20 would become 133,12d
We could write a little program to recalculate all dialogs,
unfortunately the vertical current spacing of 25 (sometimes 20) would
lead to uneven spacing for rounding reasons, so to get it really nice
all vertical positions need manual correction.

New design guides will have the following values:
First control at (5, 5), vertical spacing 15 for normal controls, 12 if
checkboxes, statics need 2 extra vertical dlg units.
Standard text control size is 133, 12
Standard button size (ok, cancel) is 46,12

I'll patch wx to obey the desktop setting for fonts, and the dialogs
will redesign according to the font automatically then.

Regards,
Andreas