Hi there! After the previous answers from Michael Sweet (forwarded to this list), Sebastian rose a key question:

GtkLayout is mainly there to overcome the limited size of X windows. When I started to develop Dw, I first tried to get a similar result by writing anything myself, but finally gave it up. Look at the Gtk+ documentation, GtkLayout does some weird things which may not be possible with FLTK.

Once again, here're the answers. Cheers Jorge.- PS note: Fl_Help_View is a widget for basic HTML rendering. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:03:52 -0400 From: Michael Sweet <mike@easysw.com> To: Jorge Arellano Cid <jcid@dillo.org> Subject: Re: FLTK and Dillo Jorge Arellano Cid wrote:

... One interesting concern raised by Sebastian is about a way to overcome the limited-window-size problem of X windows (GTK+ uses GtkLayout to overcome it). I know FLTK runs on WIN32 so it should have no problems with large windows, but I couldn't find any formal doc stating it. This is an issue for us because of large scrolled html pages (or should I say books?).

Are you referring to the 16-bit coordinate issues? If so, those are also present on WIN32... FLTK 1.1.x uses 16-bit integers for coordinates, so to support views larger than 16-bits you'll need to do a little work yourself. For example, Fl_Help_View offsets the X,Y values by the current scroll position and does gross clipping of blocks to support really long HTML files. FLTK 2.x uses 32-bit integers for coordinates and doesn't have this limitation. It will also be providing device classes to support X11, PostScript, PDF, etc. rendering in a device- independent way.

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2.- Unicode, UTF-8. This was the main reason for considering GTK2. Is FLTK ready to render Unicode characters?

The patched version is, and FLTK 2.0 will fully embrace UTF-8.

Do you mean current FLTK 2.0 CVS does not have the patch yet?

AFAIK, 2.0 doesn't have it yet. Bill Spitzak is probably a better person to talk to on that issue, as I've been sticking to maintaining 1.1.x (lack of time on my part - too many other projects! :)

If so, can it be patched or should we use 1.1.4 + utf-8 patch?

In other words, which version should we start testing with? What's your advice to structure it (i.e on which widgets should we base HTML rendering)?

Use 1.1.4 + UTF-8 patch; 2.0 is still in a state of flux, and until we have the new device classes in place there may still be some API changes. If you write to 1.1.x now, the 1.x compatibility headers in 2.0 should be enough to support your apps with either release. You'll probably want to subclass Fl_Group and use the existing Fl_Scrollbar classes to provide your scrollbars. The Fl_Help_View widget might serve as a guide for your porting effort, as it supports a limited subset of HTML and does all of the scrolling, linking, etc. stuff. -- ______________________________________________________________________ Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com Printing Software for UNIX http://www.easysw.com