complex container widgets

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH <Basile Starynkevitch wanadoo fr>]

I would like to have some complex container widget; by complex I mean
a container providing a complex layout policy.


The motivation is to support some syntax-based editor (or hypertext
editor); I would like a complex widget mixing text, drawing, and
subwidgets (for hypertext links, etc...).

Putting the children at fixed position (GtkLayout) or stacked
vertically (GtkVBox) or horizontally (GtkHBox) or in tabular fashion
(GtkTable) is not enough for me. 

I would like to be able to simply have a button following (at right or
else bellow, like in an hypertext...) a label, etc..


So I wish a complex container widget having as childs either gaps,
subwidgets, text in various style, etc...

Each such child would have associated with it a layout hint:

put the child preferably at right of previous

put the child at right if there is place, or else bellow it

put the child below it.

((the guiding idea is to have the complex widget manage its content
somehow like text; vertical only or horizontal only boxes are not
enough for me; perhaps using some crude approximation of text
formatter [TeX, Lout, troff] algorithms for paragraph typesetting?)).

Am I reinventing some existing Gtk widget?? (there are very few
contributed widgets)

Any hints, ideas, links?

I do know that my ideas are not yet clear. Also, I'm coding on my
spare time and gtk is not my main interest (The motivation about all
this is coding a reflexive system, using Gtk as the GUI, see
www.tunes.org)



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