GtkDrawingArea within a GtkScrolledWindow problem

["Norman Black" <stonybrk ix netcom com>]

I have a main window with a drawing area and I want scroll bars. I wrote
code to do the scroll bar thing and to deal with auto sizing and keeping the
horizontal scrollbar from overlapping the vertical with a spacer beside the
horizontal scrollbar. This is a bunch of ugliness so I thought I would try a
scrolled window as this would be cleaner, would work with themes therefore
letting the look and feel be controlled by the "operating system".

The scroll bars never show themselves no matter what I set the adjustment
ranges to. I had the scrolled window create the adjustments on its "new"
call. The drawing area is always whatever size the window is, so it is never
"bigger" than the scrolled window. I do not want any of the viewport "big
window peeking through a little window" as this is probably wasteful (huge
window) and I need a very large range, beyond what an X window can handle.

I assume a scrolled window only displays scroll bars if the child is bigger
than it is? How does it determine when to show/hide the scroll bars?

What are the ramifications of having the drawing area "request" a size to
make the scrolled window to behave a certain way. I would assume that the
"allocation" that follows would be big and then therefore have X
limitations.

A GtkCList works with scrolled windows, and supposedly does not has the X
window size limitation. How does it do this?

I can use the ALWAYS policy since the scroll bars display their set ranges
properly, and then switch to AUTOMATIC or NEVER when the scroll range
warrants and the scrolled window will remove the scrollbar. This is fine,
but if I can get it more automatic, then even better.

For what it is worth, I am porting from Win32, where window scroll  bars
show/hide themselves by the ranges set to them. This essentially what I am
trying to emulate in as simple a way as possible.

Best Regards,
Norman Black
Stony Brook Software