Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] RFC: Prefer GTK2 over GTK1 as default

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 9, 2004, at 2:32 AM, Ulf Lamping wrote:

> And to be honest, I don't like that approach at all, as this isn't 
> usual for win32 user (and KDE I think).

GTK+ user interfaces aren't usual for Win32 and KDE and Mac OS X/Aqua 
users, even with GTK+ 1.x-style dialog boxes.  The long-term fix is to 
have native interfaces, preferably generated from some common template, 
as per the stuff Gerald Combs is looking at (generating stub code from 
XUL).

Users not used to the GTK+ 2.x/GNOME/Mac OS X button ordering aren't 
going to like the GTK+ user interface no matter what we do.  
Consistency between dialogs might be better than partial consistency 
with GTK+ 2.x/Aqua and partial consistency with KDE/Win32/GTK+ 1.x.

> Maybe it would be better to not use the standard dialogs at all, so we 
> could switch between gnome and win32 (KDE) layout by a preference 
> setting.

I'd really prefer not to *reduce* the number of standard dialogs we 
use.  I'd like to *increase* it - for example, have a GNOME version of 
Ethereal that uses GNOME dialogs in cases where we only have our own 
because GTK+ didn't have one.

> Another problem comes to my mind:
> the GTK2 font selection cannot filter between fixed-width and 
> non-fixed-width fonts.
> The current GTK1 dialog will show only the fixed-width fonts (using 
> some GTK filtering),
> this functionality isn't available in GTK2.
> There seem's to be no solution for this :-(

There's a mail message from Owen Taylor on this:

	http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002-July/msg00202.html

"Give us code that can distinguish reliably between monospaced and
not-monospaced fonts for Type1 and TrueType fonts and at that
point it becomes reasonable to think about such an API. It's
not all that easy to do.

Even then, there are still problems - Pango by default will
draw characters not in the main font using fallback fonts --
whose metrics almost certainly don't match your grid. So,
you'd have to be able to turn this off."