Default System Theme Fonts (Windows)

Here's something else I've been working on - getting MaxGUI to use default system fonts wherever possible which match the Windows platform it is being run on.

Here are the fruits of my labour:

Old Windows 9X Fonts: (Typically MS Sans Serif)


Using The OS's Current Theme Font: (Typically Tahoma on XP, and Segeo UI on Vista)


I'm tempted to get MaxGUI to default to the themed font on each different Windows version, the problem being however that the font sizes/spacing will differ from platform to platform (which may cause some layout issues)... However, the Vista font seems to make the font sizes similar to that of Mac OS X/GTK which are a lot bigger by default anyway - so arguably your cross-platform apps should be accounting for that regardless...

What do you think? At present, this will only be affecting the new MaxGUI.Win32MaxGUIEx module.

I think you should. I also think you should possibly consider supporting the passing of nothing / null in the height parameter as specifying the standard height for a gadget for the OS (I assume one exists, at least as a style guidline).

Failing that, what would be useful would be some guidelines as to what sizes are appropriate for each OS, e.g. how many chars to allow per character, how what spacing to allow for height, between gadgets, etc. I don't believe it's feasible to cater to all this within maxgui itself.

This is an interesting idea... Perhaps, not a null value as that would be effectively '0' for integers (and some people may be wanting to create gadgets with no physical dimensions), but maybe specifying a negative height should set a standard height... Hmmmmm....


I know it's not exactly comprehensive, but Skid/Mark did write a little something on choosing the best sizes for gadgets in the "MaxGUI Overview" document under "Tutorials" in the IDE NavBar.

I guess that provided one assumes a MAXIMUM height for all gadgets (e.g. 20 pixels) and hence always leave plenty of space around each (e.g. from top of one to top of next = 24 pixels), then the actual size could vary within that. So I think such a scheme could work, provided you make it clear what these MAX & expected sizes should be. Ideally expose them as constants.