Re: Mod to hbox/vbox

[Jeff Evarts <jdeassoc earthlink net>]

Shawn T . Amundson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 21, 1999 at 08:04:33PM -0500, Jeff Evarts wrote:
> > I'd like to be able to weight the amount of space given to
> > children of an hbox or vbox.
> >
> > I can't seem to find an easy way to say "I have three
> > expandable children in this hbox, please make sure the
> > middle one gets 3/5 of the space, and the left and right
> > children get 1/5 each". If there is a way to do this
> > already, please email me and skip the rest of this document.
> >
> ...
> > Well, any thoughts?
> 
> You do not want to use a box for this, you want to use a
> table.  Below is an example for you.  The important part
> is that the middle button takes up 3 columns in the table
> and the other two only take one column each.
> 
>
> [Example using table deleted]

Actually, I'm pretty sure I really don't. I should have
said that I had tried that, but didn't like it.

My reasons are as follows:

*	First, 5 passes through the data in order to
	come up with a sizing situation that could
	easily be resolved in 2 (or even 1) is excessive.

*	I know that I won't be leaving any space unused
	(tables must account for this)

*	A share is a share, so I can simply divide the space
	and go from there, rather than finding out

		"child foo has three vertical shares, and
		a fixed size allocation of one line of text.
		Child bar is also allocated three vertical
		shares, but his vertical spacing is nine
		pixels from the shaped window..."

	and solving the word problem

I guess I should say "I know I *can* solve the problem with
tables, but they have a lot of overhead".

I know it sounds contradictory to want to move some overhead
INTO a widget to solve an overhead problem out of it, but my
additional costs are:

	one assignment per child created, and
	one multiply per child per resize.

That's not too much, compared to using a table to solve the
same problem.

Further thoughts?
-Jeff
-- 
-Jeff Evarts
--jdeassoc@earthlink.net
---http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~amarth/