Re: Spacing

[Owen Taylor <owt1 cornell edu>]

I wanted to advocate that if somebody comes up with a good way of
doing configurable spacing, it should probably go into into GTK
itself. First, if fonts and colors are configured via the gtkrc, it
would be logical to have spacing/padding configured there as
well. Second, I think this capability is of general interest to
anybody writing GTK programs, even if they aren't GNOME'izing them.

In fact, if I knew a good way of doing it, I'd be writing the patch
now.

Regards,
                                        Owen

(Three less than good ways of doing it:

 * Add xspacing, yspacing, and border_width attributes to styles.
   Then make the things like gtk_hbox_new() use these by default
   if the value of spacing parameter is -1. (possibly with a #define)

   (disadvantage: there is more than one use for an HBox in a GUI,
    and they should perhaps have different default spacings)

 * Allow the user to define certain spacing dimensions in the gtkrc
   (not necessarily as parts of styles). Then provide an interface for
   the programmer to access these.

   gtk_hbox_new (FALSE, gtk_dimension ("label_spacing"));
  
   (disadvantage: horribly clunky)

 * Make negative values to spacing parameters indicate multiples
   of some fundamental adjustable unit.

   gtk_hbox_new (FALSE, -3)

   gives a spacing of 3/10'ths of the fundamental unit.

   (disadvantage: doesn't give consistency, though it allows
    configuration)

The first is probably the best of this lot.)