Olivier Chapuis nawypisowywał(a): > Let's come back to our ship: buttons. We should recognize the good > button as fast as possible: if I want to maximize a window I want > to find my maximize button. It is clear that if the maximize button > is not rotated you will find it more easily. That's all.
Only if you are lucky (or skilled) enough to be able to actually force your brain into distinguishing between "title text" and "title buttons". I can't do this, for me it doesn't matter "text or image". Reading rotated text and not-rotated buttons is like reading a text in which one word has it's letters rotated by 90°, and the next word is "normal". But that could very well be only my problem. > Some examples: > > Menu button: |\ Iconify button: -- Maximize Button: /\ > |/ \/ -- > > If you rotate cw the buttons, then menu button looks like the > iconify button. If you rotate buttons, which buttons is the > maximize button, which one is the iconify button? The one that points to the "down" side of the title text. That's the way I figure it out. It's the same as with text - you don't read it one character at a time, you see the text as a whole, and the brain rotates it. But my brain does this not only for the text, but for the whole titlebar at once. The text is just a "marker" for the brain that allows it to quickly recognize how the titlebar has been rotated. Rotated buttons are as easy to "read" as rotated text. >> So I would be for the rotation of the button pixmaps. Pretty please :) >> (Of course as an toggle-option) >> >> Furthermore, it's just that there are themes that simply require the >> rotation of buttons. > > Which themes? themes from fvwm-themes? themes from Suzanne? No, my themes. I'm coming from Sawfish, and, well, nobody ports the themes I'm used to: http://www.sniper.kolmio.pl/public/hoppke/elberg.jpg (Here the buttons are asymmetrical enough not to cause trouble in "understanding" their meaning, but exactly this causes new troubles - it's very easy to see the titlebar as "one", and not as a composition of text and various buttons. Because there's so little symmetry, the brain doesn't pick up enough "patterns" to divide the image into functional blocks. And it learns to expect the buttons and text in this, and only this one and special relation. > The solution is to use "UseTitleStyle" in ButtonStyle for defining the > background (this is rotated) and to AddButtonStyle the various > foreground buttons. That's the way I do my decors, but still - it isn't actually the button background - it's the foreground pattern that counts. > Of course, one can implement something like > > {Stretch,Shrunk,Tiled,Adjusted,}Pixmap (AllowsRotation) file > > in ButtonStyle. But I am not sure this is a good idea. This may > leads to some terrible fvwm config decoration hack (as the current > nanoGUI fvwm-themes theme). Well, that would be powerfull, as you could choose to rotate button1, and leave others intact. But I guess that a Style option "AllowButtonRotation" or something like that would do the trick as well, and would fit just fine. >> The current rotation feature is great, but if a theme uses >> not-so-symmetrical buttons you will never *want* to rotate the >> titlebar - because the theme will start to look ugly, or it will >> simply lose it's "magic". Unless the buttons get rotated together >> with the text/background pixmaps. > > Do you have an example that cannot be fixed by a clever config? Say... Kliin. An IceWM theme, trivial to port. The "magic" concerns the leftmost and rightmost buttons. A (very bad quality) screenshot is available on freshmeat, http://images.freshmeat.net/screenshots/30637.png (I could post a tarball with the decor+sample config after porting to fvwm, less than 3KB, if the screenshot should really be that unreadable) The "catches" are the horizontal lines that "sprout" from the sidemost buttons. If these lines don't get rotated, Kliin just isn't what it used to be. -- \hoppke (Grzegorz Nieweglowski) -- Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL:http://www.fvwm.org/>. To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm-workers" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To report problems, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
