Zugg Software :: View topic - [2.22] Various label and form alignment issues

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:41 pm

I went hunting for label and alignment problems this morning, and here is what I found. Although some are pretty minor, I figure they may as well get polished up.

- Using WinXP SP2.

Some of the problems I found are always present, others are only found after resizing the window.

It seems like the intent of most forms is for all the labels, text boxes, etc. to be be stationary even if the window is resized. If that's the case, you may need to add a scroll bar to the panels so you can get to all the fields in a small window. There are various cases where labels or text boxes resize inconsistantly (these cases should be easy to see in the screenshots).

Also, some of these might be already reported in other posts.. hopefully not too many!

1. Start a blank session --> click on Options: Session Properties... --> Character tab
Note: There are issues on the other tabs of this window too, but I forgot to get screenshots of them.. oops

2. From the regular Sessions window, right-click an icon --> Edit Session
2a. Session tab
Note: The overlapping text at the bottom of the form appears on each tab

2b. Character tab

2c. Package Files tab

3. Sessions window, File --> New... --> Session
- The text towards the top wraps strangely when resizing the window smaller.

The next several items are pretty self explanitary. A lot of them are from resizing.
4.
- Well.. don't miss the top left corner in all of these.. only outlined in the first image.
- And especially don't miss the buttons that slide over or under each other as you resize the window.

5.

6. The same issue as in #10. The text box is resized with the window, but appears like it goes off the edge of it.

7.

8.

9.

10. Here the two text boxes are resized with the window (which is ok), but they appear to go past the edge of the window.

Now some from the Package Editor...
11.

12.

13.

14. Package Editor --> Edit --> Package Properties

15. Help --> Contents
- Some issues with title and background coloring
- Note the small area that wasn't getting painted correctly. In this shot it is carrying over some of the orange from highlighted tab of the window behind.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Wow! That is a very detailed post. Excellent bug reporting.

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 1:56 pm

Yes plenty of label alignment issues there. Zugg is sure going to be pissed again! On the size issue though I think perhaps Zugg needs to force a minimum size because horizontal and vertical scrollbars on forms can start to piss you off very quickly. Specific sizing can also cause issues though especially if people change the default system font for a much crazier/larger font, of course the user can resize the window larger to compensate and perhaps that should be encouraged.

Oh and can someone confirm that these alignment issues exist in Vista because they may not especially if Zugg has changed the form design from Tahoma 8pt to Segoe UI 9pt now that he is using Vista as a development platform.

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 5:27 pm

Thanks for the detailed posts on this. Hopefully your ImageShack images will still be there in a couple of week when I am next able to start working on this.

Some of the issues won't get fixed. For example, cases where buttons overlap each other when shrinking the window are still going to happen. There just isn't any good way to handle that situation. There is no way to make the buttons "wrap" to another line, or anything like that. In theory I could let the buttons themselves shrink, but that isn't any better since then you can't even read their captions.

Adding scrollbars to the form also isn't a good solution in most cases. Enabling the normal "AutoScroll" feature in Delphi forms will actually cause the scrollbars to appear whenever you run with a large font (rather than trying to scale the form to the new font), so that would be a huge mess.

Finally, please also let me know exactly what your Windows XP system font is set to. Make sure you are using the 96 DPI font setting and let me know if your system font is set differently from Tahoma 8pt.

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:20 pm

Windows XP SP2 default system font here (Tahoma 8pt) and I can confirm the label alignment is as per the pictures.

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 9:51 pm

Sigh...there is *still* a bug in the DevExpress label control. It does not right-align properly when contained within a "page control" (a component with tabs along the top). This doesn't effect some of the problems shown above, but it does cause lots of various alignment problems in other parts of CMUD too. I've reported the bug but since they just updated their components last week, I'm going to need to figure it out myself for the 2.23 public release.

You know, the last thing I wanted to spend time on for the public release was to put more hours into these stupid alignment bugs of theirs. I must be the only one developing for Vista and using the default Vista system font in my apps who care about this stuff.