Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!apple!tecot
From: tecot@Apple.COM (Ed Tecot)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Pop-up menus and MPW scripts
Message-ID: <39844@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 26 Mar 90 23:07:10 GMT
References: <27526@cup.portal.com> <10910@claris.com>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 20

In article <10910@claris.com> brendan@claris.com (Brendan McCarthy) writes:
>Yes.  We've encountered this apparently problem too.  It seems that some 
>bright engineer at Apple was playing with the system MDEF, saw the 2 pixel
>horizontal offset, and figured that no-one would care if it was removed.
>Now, our Claris MDEF checks which version of the system you're running and
>draws the menu the same way the system does.  Thanks Apple.

Wow.  I've been called many things, but never bright.  I can explain the
change:

Up until 6.0.4, the space reserved for item marks was a hard-coded constant.
Although it looked a little wierd in the US, the real problem was in other
countries - if the font was larger than Chicago 12 or draw from right-to-left,
the overlapping characters made things impossible to read.  I changed the
offset to be calculated from the font - it's now identical to a space.

Of course, this makes me a little curious - as developers, in the future,
would you rather that we fix bugs like these, or leave them alone?

						_emt