My problem is that we have developed a product using 480x800 on a 10" LCD display, and we want to "give the idea" to a customer who has a PC.
No modestly-priced laptop has a vertical resolution of 800 these days, probably because of 720p standards, but I digress.
Basically, I want to take a suggestion back to the designer, who used Qt, and suggest something that will work. He has already stated that it is impossible, but I suspect that is laziness talking.
As a .NET developer, I know how easy it is to scale a WinForms application, but I don't want to suggest something where I have no expertise, and while searching StackOverflow and Google for tips with scaling and Qt have yielded no results.
Is there something easy to cause an entire application to scale downwards in Qt?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
If you mean normal scaling where some widgets retain their sizes and some scale, then yes, it's really easy (like what a WinForms developer achieves with anchors if I remember correctly). Just a matter of using layouts and spacers. Grid and form layouts are very flexible but in case a more complicated layout is needed it's easy to add a subcontainer that has a different layout. This layout concept is similar to Java SWING and AWT layouts.
Also, if he used Qt Creator to design the ui, then selecting the container and applying grid layout often yields the desired results (it's on the toolbar).
If you mean proportional scaling of all widgets then it's not simple. One would need to override the resizeEvent and scale all widgets accordingly, plus fonts are tricky to scale well.
Related
When i add splitters, it acts as a layout, but also allows to resize the widgets in runtime. So, for example, i managed to lay out my widgets in this way:
Therefore, i can resize my widgets in runtime. As i noticed, this function is also available in designer mode, but it doesn't work properly. I tried to hover over my splitter and drag it in designer mode, but it only replaces the entire widget.
That is how does my main window look like in QtDesigner. I haven't tried to code yet. The problem is, that even though i used to set a stretch factor, my widegt's look in designer mode and in runtime completely differ. They have another sizes.
So, what are the problems:
Firstly, i can't change my widgets sizes properly, using stretch factors. I don't know, i tried to change size policies, but i did't manage to see an effect. I have somehow changed size of the vertically oriented widgets, but when speak about horizontal orientation - stretch factor and size policy doesn't change anything at all.
Secondly, i can't move my splitter in designer mode. It's position is constant, by default, it's always somewhere in the middle.
Thirdly, i have bugs (i think so) with my widget sizes in designer mode. They differ with widget's sizes in runtime.
Question:
So, how can i change widget's sizes properly? Maybe there's a way of moving a splitter in designer mode - do newer versions of Qt have it? Currently i'm using Qt 5.9.9. Also, why these bugs, and are they bugs at all. Maybe i just should update my Qt to newer versions to get access to newer functionalities?
Comment: I'm not sure if stretch factors work with layout as they do with widgets. I'm using layouts exactly the same way i use widgets. My layout's wrong(maybe) use may have caused this problem. Anyways, i'm entirely new to Qt, and may not know something to understand it completely.
I had experience with Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation, and I personally think the only thing I want to use is their grid system. Other features are just bloated.
So I read about the prospect of a grid layout. All of the articles I found are oriented toward an 'artistic' explanation (golden ratio ect). I am a coder at heart, I need a clear & logical reason to use a grid layout (for example: 'columns can be easily stacked on top of each other on mobile screen, and expand horizontally on larger screens'). Can someone give me the pros and cons of applying a grid system to my website? Personally do you think using a grid system is good?
If the answer is yes, should I use a premade grid system like from Twitter Bootstrap/Foundation or just make one for my own? All of the other features are unnecessary for me an irrelevant to my problem.
Thanks! :D
I agree with #kunalbhat that this might not be the best area to ask this but since you did I will try to answer it.
The grids are designed allow for speed and adaptability. Speed in multiple senses. The first part of the speed is the speed of writing the code. You can easily get the layout you want when you are using the grid system and everything aligns correctly. You don't have to remember your tables and columns and col-spans, etc.
The second speed is modifying your code. Inevitably you will need to go back and make changes, with a grid this is easily to do. Changing a col-md-7 to a col-md-6 easily makes a little tweak in the layout of your page that can easily be tracked and performed.
You mentioned responsive design, both Bootstrap and Foundation have responsive grids. The grids will snap to different sizes based on the viewport size. However you have control as well. For example if you want something to take 1/12th the screen in desktop, 1/4th on a tablet, and 100% on a phone that is easily done with Bootstrap and Foundation, both have grid classes that target specific viewports.
The also provide visibility classes based on those viewports.
For the "bloated" part that is easily solved. Using SCSS you can easily only import portions of a library. For example for one project I was on I only imported the Grid and it was considerably smaller.
I happen to think that this is a SO question, simply because of one of the main cons of CSS grid systems: semantic.
I think semantic is important for a web developer and having a class named col-md-7 is not the most semantic thing to do.
But I like grids, because they are easy and quick to use, so I started to use LESS. Because it allows me to use variables and functions(mixins) in CSS, I can build my own grid system on my CSS rather then on my HTLM.
You can start on Frameless and customize your own 'classes'.
I'm building an application, which is cross-platform (Linux, Win, OS X), and especially does graphics stuff via Cairo(mm), supported by a little bit of GTK+ scaffolding (i.e. DrawingArea). I now need some UI elements, which require a certain custom look. Ideally they should also be displayed as transparent overlay (i.e. different opacities for different parts of the UI).
As GTK+ is hard to customize (e.g. I want an edit-field with the suggestion-list above it), and me basically exactly knowing how I'd achieve this with HTML/CSS, the question popped up: Why not just let libwebkit handle the UI stuff?
I don't have much experience with WebKit, so what I need to know is:
Does my above reasoning make sense to anybody else?
CSS has opacity, can I interface WebKit in such way that it renders onto an RGBA-offscreen surface, with alpha-values inherited from the layout-processing of the CSS styles?
Even if 2. would not work, has anybody used libwebkit on an offscreen surface, which AFAIK requires redirection of keyboard and mouse interactions, probably via GTK+s provisions?
Is it possible to render web content over a clear background using WebKit?
is probably as good as it gets.
On a form designed with Qt Designer, I have two QGroupBoxes with a bunch of controls in each of them. Both group boxes have nearly the same contents (QLineEdits with associated labels).
What I want to do, however, is to align the controls together, as if they were part of the same grid layout. But since they are in separate containers, they can't share the same layout, and I don't want to give them a fixed width.
Is there a way to do it in Qt Designer? If not, is there a way to do it in code?
Thanks!
There is no way to do this in Designer. As far as I know, Qt does not provide a good way to do this in code either. If you really want this, you will probably have to rely on something a little hacky.
Here's my first idea: Override resizeEvent() in the widget that contains the two group boxes to get the preferred size (via sizeHint() or minimumSizeHint()) of all of the labels and set the fixed width of all the labels to the largest preferred width.
I would encourage you to ask yourself if this really matters (is it worth the development time?) and consider whether you can avoid the problem entirely with a slightly different UI design.
BTW, you might want to take a look at QFormLayout if you haven't already.
This issue is obviously bigger than I thought! Using the VS2008 form designer for web pages, it'd a doddle to lay everything out using pixels. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's very hard to use absolution positioning and anything but pixels.
So my webapp has developed nicely until somebody mentioned the 120DPI issue and I've wandered off into another field which I've managed to kind of ignore.
I'm the person who thinks if you get a bigger monitor, it's because you want to display more windows on there with the same size text, not make everything bigger because you're 40 and your eyes are playing up ;-)
Given that there isn't a way for the designer to lay things out in anything apart from pixels, is there is half way house? I'm not about to go through every inline style changing from pixels to em values. Sorry, but that's just too much work for a volunteer written webapp.
Is it okay to keep pixels for the layout of text boxes etc. but switch to using some percentage based system for fonts? Will that size correctly?
This is only a problem in IE7. IE8 looks at the DPI setting and scales the x,y,w,h values as required. I appreciate this is both right and wrong at the same time. IE8 now works correctly with 120DPI where fixed pixel sizes have been used.
Cheers, Rob.
Have you considered not using such strict control over your sizes? In general, you will probably find it much easier to specify as few sizes and positions as possible. HTML is designed to handle size and position dynamically. The less you specify explicitly, the more able the browser is to arrange the page as needed to fit the user's browser size and viewing preferences.
Anyway, if you really must make heavy use of fixed positioning and such, I highly recommend you not use the visual designers in visual studio. They are very much NOT up to the task. I'd recommend looking around for other designer tools that handle the WYSIWYG stuff better. While I'm not a fan, dreamweaver does a respectable job with absolute positioning and has at least some support for aspx too.
Might I suggest using the YUI 'reset-fonts-grids.css' CSS from Yahoo, then you can use EMs as your units for fonts meaning the user's browser can decide how large or small to show the text.