user interface

[Kent Boortz]

Chris Pressey <cpressey@REDACTED> writes:
> So, if you really want to make my day (even though I am not a paying
> customer, for shame, I don't even use EMACS or own a cell phone,) you can
> start by telling me that R9 is coming out soon and that it ships with an
> updated GS that uses Tcl/Tk 8 as its backend and that that backend doesn't
> crash when run under Windows ME.

I can't tell you all that but something is done to move there. I have
just been working with moving GS to Tcl/Tk 8.3.4 on Unix and Tcl/Tk
8.3.2 on Windows for a couple of days.

  - I have rewritten the font handling to use the Tk 8 font model.

  - For the OpenSource version the Tcl/Tk sources will no longer be
    part of the Erlang/OTP TAR source package. Instead the system wide
    installation of Tcl/Tk will be used. Tcl/Tk binaries will be part
    of commercial releases and the Windows release. I have rewritten
    configure scripts, make files etc to make this happen.

  - I have rewritten the port program used on Unix to conform to a
    more "normal" use of the Tcl/Tk C API.

  - I have made the Windows specific changes but this is not tested.

  - I use my own Tcl/Tk port program "stand alone" approach for
    commercial releases, I initiate Tcl/Tk to use the startup files in
    "$ERLTOP/lib/gs/priv/lib/".

GS is very complex so I try to port it without changing to much. What
I know I have to do is

  - Do a lot of testing ;-) There are many small changes not even
    documented between the Tcl/Tk versions.

  - I have to test it on Windows (I'm not a Windows person so this
    may take some time).

  - I have to find out how to change Tk 8 to wrap text at "\n" in
    labels. This worked in Tk 4.2 and some GS apps depends on it.

  - The old GS wrote strings to a hidden window to find out the width
    needed to display the text in a container. I try to use "font
    measure $fontspec" but if I can get the "\n" working I need to
    define a tcl function that calculate the longest line in a string
    (if someone is good at tcl you are welcome to help me out ;-). I
    know that this is probably not the right way to go but as I said,
    I don't want to rewrite all of GS.

  - I have started coding for using the new top menu handling in Tk 8,
    i.e. to get native look and feel for the top menus.

I hope to get it out for Unix testing in the P9 snapshots later this
week if everything goes well.

kent