Re: [Texmacs-dev] Double licensing or exceptional clauses

[David Allouche]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 05:45:55PM +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

> > As long as you can make the symbol menus (which is maybe a bit tricky)
> > and update the menus on the fly (which any half-decent toolkit can
> > do), I do not see what is the problem.
> 
> Yes, but these things may already be problematic: in wxWindows,
> they only seem to support latin string labels and bitmaps (under Windows).
> This is also a problem for supporting Russian.

Bitmaps are enough for the symbol menus.

The only right way of supporting russian on non-Xlib system is to use
the system's internationalization features. Indeed, if wxWindows does
not allow us to use Windows Multilingual Extensions, we have a problem.
 
> > METAFONT-rendered menus are not a feature. They are disruptive of
> > look-and-feel policies and even if they are cute, they are *not* to be
> > kept with other toolkits.
> 
> I do not agree with you; I will keep this as a default option, at least on X.
> Many users like the application for this single reason and I am not going
> to change that. But I do agree on making other types of menus an option.
> Many people don't care about disruptive look-and-feel policies:
> they maximize the TeXmacs window on the screen and want something
> as nice and beautiful as possible. Under GNU/Linux there is no
> coherent look-and-feel policy anyway.

Well, on GNU/Linux I admit that you can hardly be disruptive of
look-and-feel policy since, in practice, there is no such thing.

On Windows, there is a policy, though it is poorly defined, and often
users care little about it. One MacOS though, there is a very strong
and very clearly defined policy, and user do not like programs which
do not respect it.

But using custom menus on win32/MacOS will probably buy us many more
problems, like problems of conformance with system-wide GUI
configuration. On GNU/Linux there is no such thing, but all other
system do have this feature and all users expect program to behave
accordingly.
 
> I also want to keep the possibility open to render formulas and
> other material in the menus. Think of a menu of frequently used
> formulas selected by the user (a wish). Also, a good GUI should
> allow me to do this ANYWAY.

Agreed. Pixmaps menu items should be enough to do this.

> The METAFONT-rendered menus in TeXmacs
> are not a "cute" and "isolated" particularity. They are both a piece
> of modern GUI design and recognized as being esthaetically superior
> by many users. I am willing to throw away virtually anything in
> the current GUI, but not this FEATURE.

METAFONT rendered menus are 'cute' when there is no compelling reason
to use them in preference to standard menus. And they are isolated since
only TeXmacs use them, and all other application use standard menus...

Well... okay, "standard menus" do not exist in GNU/Linux.

And about aesthetic superiority, I recognize that antialiased CM fonts
are nice to see, but I am absolutely not convinced that they are more
readable (read ergonomic) than, say, Arial on Win32, Chicago on MacOS
Classic, or Charcoal on MacOS X.

BTW, do not forget that all modern GUI systems already provide
antialiased menus as a standard feature.

-- 

                             -- David --