Re: Platform Independent vs. Platform Specific Behavior (was: Re: [libreoffice-design] Take inspiration from Lotus Symphony ?)

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 14:29 -0600, Scott Pledger wrote:
> Kohei,
>
> Good to know! I haven't yet taken too close of a look at the code for LO, so
> I don't know any of the particulars of the back-end as of yet, but that's
> next on my to-do list!
>
> Quick question: Where can I find documentation on VCL??

Well, that's a bit hard to come by. ;-)  We do have some code
documentation but it may not be what you'd expect.

http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classes.html

It's generated by crawling the source code directly and picking up the
doxygen style comments.  These are very low level details of the VCL
code, and if you are looking for a high-level overview, we don't have
any (that I'm aware of).

>   I think that having
> a better understanding of what our rendering library is currently capable of
> can really help with UI improvements...

I can tell you it's very very limited.  With VCL, you have to specify
the size and position of each and every control at pixel level, and
there is no automatic layout support that most modern GUI toolkits
support.  For instance, to create a simple dialog with OK and Cancel
button, you need to define

Dialog: size = (200, 150)

OK Button: pos = (10, 180); size = (80, 15)
Cancel Button: pos = (100, 180); size = (80, 15)

and so on.  It's painful enough to design a very simple dialog, imagine
how much pain it would incur when designing a complex one...

But don't let this implementation limitation distract your design work.
Sometimes it's better you don't know the implementations. ;-)

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida@novell.com>


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