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From: newsuser@oliver.SUBLINK.ORG (Ugo Cei)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Re: Table Widget - Discussed earlier this year
Message-ID: <1099@oliver.SUBLINK.ORG>
Date: 26 Jun 91 07:38:16 GMT
Article-I.D.: oliver.1099
References: <301@trwacs.UUCP> <5663@ztivax.UUCP>
Reply-To: cei@ipvvis.unipv.it
Distribution: comp.windows.x
Organization: Oliver, Pavia, Italy
Lines: 49

[ I would have mailed this one, but no address is given for the
poster, so please bear with me. ]

sof3@ztivax.UUCP (Walter Meyer) [David Smyth, actually] writes:

>There will be a new one (margins, additional nicities, better
>documentation) with Wcl 1.06 which is just about ready.  I'm
>just making sure it works with X11R5 right now.  A week or so...

>David Smyth
>Object X Guru
>reliable email address coming soon (again)

I, for one, have found the Table widget to be very useful for a
variety of purposes. Indeed, I did all sorts of tricks on a Form
(Athena) widget to make it behave like a table, before I discovered
this one. However, and it may well be my fault in interpreting the
docs, I have never been able to make the Table widget do one simple
trick: to lock the borders of its children so that they always align
with their neighbors. Let me show what I mean with a brief example:

    +---+---+---+
    | A | B | C |
    +---+---+---+
    |   D   | E |
    +-------+---+

What I would like is that the border between widgets B and C and the
border between D and E be always aligned, regardless of how the Table
is resized. Nowadays, due to the way in which extra space is
redistributed among widgets (or missing space is subtracted from
them), and depending on the Table's size and the geometry requests of
its children, this is not guaranteed to happen (at least I have not
been able to make it happen). I have found at least two applications
in which this may be useful: one is a calculator, the other is a block
diagram layout, where the connections from one block to its neighbors
should be always aligned. In both these cases I have hacked the Table
widget source in a horrible way to make it behave like I want (the
trick is to pretend that the preferred dimensions of every child are
1x1 pixels), but I would very much like to have this sort of behavior
specifiable along with the other layout options.

I apologise if I annoyed someone with this lengthy description,
especially if I overlooked something in the FM. Thanks to everybody
who will be so kind to lend me is attention.
-- 
**************** | Ugo Cei            | home:    newsuser@oliver.sublink.org
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