Re: Text label mis-sizing / clipping

[Adrian Robert]

> > Also, while Gorm could perhaps be modified to
> > enforce the needed generous sizing automatically,
>
> 2. is easily done in Gorm by using Vera Sans as the system font when 
> designing.

Currently, you must set the display font for Gorm itself to do this.  
This is because Gorm designs the interface using the same font defaults 
as it is running with itself; but it does not store this config info in 
the nib.  If (2) is going to be a primary solution it would be nice to 
have Gorm use the default font size of 12 (and perhaps set family to 
something like the 'Vera Sans') in the interface design window(s) 
regardless of what setting it happens to be running with.  (Or make 
this the default value for a global or project prefs setting.)  You 
could then use your preferred font settings to work in Gorm and still 
develop standard interfaces.

Failing this, then Gorm should perhaps just ignore any user font 
settings; I think it is too much to ask that developers execute various 
defaults gymnastics just to get a Gorm that will design standard 
interfaces.. most people want to spend minimal time on laying out 
panels and just get down to the model and control code, and the whole 
philosophy of having Gorm is that you can do this.


> (Note that you could achieve something similar manually by just 
> setting the NSFontSize default.)

I did some experimentation and it turns out that most applications 
respond only partially to this default, presumably because they have 
some font sizes specified manually.  In addition, Gorm itself 
encourages this in certain cases, because the text label widget 
displayed as 'Title' on the widget palette specifies its font manually, 
as far as I can tell to system font family, size=14.  If you design an 
interface using this widget (in fact most panels use it somewhere), 
then these widgets do not respond to NSFontSize.  In addition, it is 
supposed to be used for heading text, as the word "Title" implies, but 
since there is no other general-purpose label widget, most people use 
it as a label as well.  I suggest that this widget be removed from the 
palette and a set of 3 or 4 that use the system fonts be put in 
instead, as Apple's IB does (in 10.3; screenshot attached, see bottom 
right).

A typical illustration of use of 'Title' as a label exists in 
CodeEditor's preferences pane (attached), where the 'seconds' and 
'lines' are in this size-14 "Title" font and the other text, part of 
NSButton, is in system font.

I don't mean any of the above to sound like I'm bashing Gorm by the way 
-- if it wasn't such an excellent, complete implementation we would be 
complaining about far less trivial things than font sizes...