Re: A proposal for units in GTK+

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 07:53, Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> A nicer solution would be to be able to give sizes to widgets in units
> other than pixels.  For example, being able to pack buttons one 'em'
> apart would be one nice solution.

Just for fun, I checked with our longer-serving UI bods to see if they
could remember how OpenLook did this  :) Here's what they dug up:

  From the OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface Functional Specification...
 
  page xxiv:
  Under the neading of Device Independence, there is a paragraph that 
  says... "the OPEN LOOK UI is specified in terms of units that are 
  independent of any device. THe unit used in this specification is the 
  point -- the basic unit of typographical measurement -- equal to 
  approximately 1/72 of an inch (0.352 millimeters). Refer to Appendix B 
  for detailed specifications of each element."
 
  Appendix B then has 80 pages of pictures of Pointers, Icons, Controls, 
  etc. using "points" as the unit of interest. There is a note that, in 
  most cases, the displays/CRTs used will have 72 pixels per inch making 1 
  pixel == 1 point.

Java also still specifies everything in pixels, so that's no help :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems