What's new in eComSTation 2.0? Dialog fonts

Alex Taylor said in eComStation@yahoogroups.com RC7 includes a new feature which may not be obvious, so I'm making a small announcement about it... because I would like testing and feedback on it.

For users who are too impatient to read the long description below, the exective summary is this: you can now dynamically change the font used on (most) dialogs throughout the system, without suffering from clipped text on controls (up to a point, at least). The WPS properties notebooks are exempt from this, sadly; it mostly applies to secondary dialogs. Read the details below for a description of the feature, its limitations, advantages, and disadvantages.

All versions of eComStation have included redesigned dialogs based on Richard Castle's superb 'Dialog Enhancer' product. The main features of these dialogs have been (a) improved layout of controls - generally intended to make them more attractive, more user-friendly, and/or more space-efficient; and (b) standardized use of the 'WarpSans' font.

These dialogs have received incremental updates (various bugfixes and minor tweaks here and there) over the years. However, RC7 marks the first major overhaul of the entire system, and so testing and feedback would be much appreciated.

The major change is this: most of the dialogs are NO LONGER hard-coded to use 9.WarpSans as the font. Instead, they are designed with the system default font (usually System Proportional). This was done for two main reasons:

• eStyler 1.1 (introduced in eCS 2.0) includes a feature to set all dialogs to a user-defined font (at least for dialogs which don't have any specific font coded). This is set (during eCS installation) to 9.WarpSans by default. So it's no longer necessary to set every individual dialog to use WarpSans.

  Moreover, because this feature allows users to set potentially larger fonts for all dialogs, it made more sense to (re)design the dialogs for use with System Proportional, which is one of the largest fonts available. Thus, you can set the dialog font (in eStyler) to System Proportional or anything smaller, and text should still display correctly.

• I was persuaded, in no small part thanks to Jim Read, that designing dialogs for WarpSans was a bad idea... because it causes the dialogs to become completely munged up if the PM default dialog font is ever changed. By this, I'm referring not to the eStyler feature, but the built-in PM_SystemFonts key "DefaultFont". Changing this key sets the dialog font system-wide, but unlike the eStyler feature it also changes the default dialog unit (DU) size, causing all dialog controls to shrink if the font size is smaller than System Proportional. (Jim pointed out that he recommends all his users set this key for various reasons, and that it's automatically set by some video drivers as well.) It, or a close equivalent, is also set automatically (indeed, it cannot be UN-set) on all DBCS versions of OS/2.

Basically, designing all dialogs for System Proportional will avoid the problem of dialog controls being cropped if DefaultFont is ever set or changed.

In summary, most secondary dialogs are no longer coded to use 9.WarpSans. (The improved layout derived from Dialog Enhancer is still present, although of course it had to be reworked a bit in some cases.)

I fully anticipate this to be a rather controversial change, but it was not something I did lightly, or without carefully considering the various ramifications. I was convinced, in the end, that this was the most advantageous approach, regardless of its corresponding disadvantages (for which, see below).

ADVANTAGES

• You now have much more complete control over the appearance of dialogs.

  Specifically most secondary dialogs can now use almost any font, without causing clipped controls. up to a point, at least. You can set this using eStyler (if you don't need to use a font larger than System Proportional), or the PM "DefaultFont" key if you don't mind the system-wide rescaling of dialog controls this causes. (The latter may result in problems with third-party applications, so I personally recommend using eStyler.)

  This should be useful to users with vision problems, or those running on extremely high video resolutions.

• Systems which have the "DefaultFont" key set in OS2.INI should no longer see clipped text on dialogs.

DISADVANTAGES

• Since all dialogs must now 'work' with fonts as large as System Proportional, almost all dialogs are necessarily much larger than they were, and the spacing of controls is sometimes rather wide (though not generally as wide as they were in the original, unmodified IBM dialogs).

  In particular, when the default font is set to 9.WarpSans (or another small font) using the eStyler method, controls on many dialogs may seem unusually widely-spaced. Some users may find this annoying, although I have generally tried to design the dialogs such as to minimize the phenomenon.

  (Using the "DefaultFont" method will largely avoid this problem.)

• Because of the potentially disruptive nature of setting the "DefaultFont" key, SBCS versions of eCS use the eStyler method by default. However, this of course depends on eStyler being installed.

  If you don't install eStyler, dialogs will therefore display using System Proportional, which you may find large and ugly. This also means that most dialogs will be limited to System Proportional during parts of the OS installation (before eStyler gets installed).

  (Conversely, for various technical reasons, DBCS versions of eCS will use the "DefaultFont" key (or rather, its DBCS equivalent) and have the eStyler feature disabled by default.)

• Another point worth mentioning is that listbox controls don't seem to react very well to having their font changed by eStyler: you tend to get artifacts from scrolling at the bottom of the list control. For this reason, I had to retain the hardcoded WarpSans on a couple of dialogs, notably the system File dialog.

  It should be pointed out, however, that this problem was present (mostly in third-party applications) even without my changes to the system dialogs, so it's not actually a problem with this redesign.

  (Actually, I've recently discovered that setting the LS_NOADJUSTPOS style on the listbox may eliminate this problem, so I will probably experiment with using that in future updates.)

I should also note that dialogs where the font is actually set to WarpSans programmatically (like all the WPS system properties notebooks) will still be WarpSans, regardless of your font settings... but they should receive the other advantages (i.e. no clipped text with "DefaultFont").

(However, I've noticed something very interesting about the WPS properties notebooks. It seems that the font is hardcoded to WarpSans, but the point size is actually dynamic to some extent. I discovered this after installing my "10.WarpSans" font (available on my website), and all the WPS properties notebooks now have larger 10-point text on my laptop (1400x1005) ...except, noticeably, the ones from XWorkplace, which do appear hard-coded to 9-point.)

Finally, let me add that the avoidance of clipped text is entirely dependent on me having properly re-tuned all of the dialogs. If you do find a system dialog with clipped text, please report it to me so that I may correct it.