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- Apple II
- Technical Notes
- _____________________________________________________________________________
- Developer Technical Support
-
-
- Apple IIGS
- #5: Window and Menu Titles
-
- Revised by: Matt Deatherage November 1988
- Written by: Dan Oliver October 1986
-
- This Technical Note discusses spacing for both window and menu titles.
- _____________________________________________________________________________
-
- Strings used for window titles should always have a space as the first and
- last characters. This spacing is especially important for windows that use a
- lined window title bar since, without the beginning and ending space, the line
- pattern in the title bar runs against the title. Since there will be window
- editor desk accessories which allow the user to change the title bar pattern
- without the application knowing, you should pad your window titles with spaces
- even if you are using black window title bars.
-
- The Window Manager does not force spaces on either side of titles to optimize
- the window frame drawing speed; it is much faster to let the text punch a hole
- in the title bar pattern than to compute the rectangle, fill it, and draw the
- text.
-
- To provide the user with a consistent visual interface, you should also pad
- your menu titles with spaces. If you use either one or two spaces (the Apple
- IIGS Finder has used two) before and after each menu title, your menu titles
- will be consistent and balanced (two spaces work well in 640 mode where one
- space usually suffices for 320 mode). Although it is true that a menu bar
- will look about the same if the first menu title has two spaces before it and
- no space following it and all the other menu titles have four spaces before
- them, when the user pulls down the menu, the Menu Manager's highlighting will
- clearly (and embarrassingly) show the spaces in the menu titles.
-
- If you would like to place the Apple menu differently, you must use Menu
- Manager calls since you cannot place spaces around the at sign (@) which the
- Menu Manager uses to represent the Apple logo in a menu title. The easiest
- way to accomplish this is calling SetMTitleStart to set the starting position
- for the leftmost title (usually the Apple menu) within the current menu bar.
- The Apple IIGS Finder has used a value of 10 ($0A) pixels.
-