Parbox

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj styx net>]

Good evening.

I'm wondering if there's any such thing as a "parbox" container widget, a la
TeX parboxes, out there. That is, a box that packs its children in a flowing
manner - left->right then top->bottom (configurable?).

If not, I'm wondering if it would be technically possible (not too slow using
the GTK widget paradigm) to make such a container holding possibly a
tremendous number of children - words in a text processor, pixmaps in a
file/picture browser, misc. widgets in a programmer interface, etc.

The background for this question/suggestion is that I've made a specialized
XML editor for a customer of ours. The code is GPL, but not much use in its
current form, I'm afraid. Working under tight deadlines is such a drag.

So, I'm reimplementing it as a more generic XML editor - not just a
bread-and-butter editor, I know those exist - but one that's more aimed at
non-technical users. Frontend with pluggable tag rendering functions,
scriptable output backend (for TeX, HTML, etc) and probably, for the future,
a centralized database. I already have some of the parts, and I've mapped a
great deal of the work required.

As I said, I want to implement this in a generic way, and that means putting
as much code as possible in reusable GTK widgets.

So what it boils down to is, I need some hints.

1) Does a parbox-like container widget exist, or is someone working on it?

2) If it does not, would it be feasible to make one in the manner outlined
   above?

3) Would it accomplish something useful, or would it be better to just make a
   specialized "XML editor widget"?

-- 
Hans Petter K. Jansson, programmer              Simplemente Soluciones
hpj@simplemente.net                            http://simplemente.net/
Nicolás San Juan #239                              Tel: +52 5 639 1261
Col. Del Valle CP. 03100, México D.F, Mexico       Fax: +52 5 639 4860