Documentation is always a problem. I dont use Spec because I dont like it , but I use Morphic for my project ChronosManager. I do some "styling" for example use different fonts for different labels , different sizes , I format strings to time stamps and even offer easy ways for user to change them without modifying the whole string.
You can do a lot with Morphic, though I have not played with layout stuff since this GUI is static and image (PNGs) based but yeah Morphic can do that as well. My project is on Catalog browser and it has class comments , dont know if this exactly what you want but it may be a good start. Obviously there are a ton of things you can do with a web page that Morphic will not offer you out of the box. You can use Html as the front end / GUI and keep Pharo as the backend, thats how most web apps made with Pharo work. This you get the full power of Html/JS and Pharo. Seaside has classes that map html to pharo methods so you dont have to write html and js, and also I remember a pharo library dealing with CSS. Another option is to use a GUI API like QT , I have tried this with my python bridge and it works at least on a very basic level, again similar recipe to the above solution. But yeah if you are not too demanding I think Morphic will serve you well. Personally I only like Morphic , its the only GUI API that does not kill my inner child. On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 5:44 PM Tommaso Dal Sasso < tommaso.dalsa...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello everybody, > > I have a question about the UI toolkits available for Pharo. I already > asked something about this on Slack, but since I saw that there was a > recent discussion about UI in the mailing list, I think this is a better > place to discuss the matter. > > I am writing an application for Pharo where I am displaying some > structured text. The structure is similar to the one of a web page: A > main title with a list of paragraphs, where each paragraph has a title > and a description. > > What I would like to do is to format the text to present the contents in > a meaningful way: For example, I would like a bigger font for the title, > and change the background of the text, to give a better separation > between the paragraphs. Basically I would like to manipulate and display > my contents as I would do in a web page. > > To write UI widgets I usually use Spec, but I found that going beyond > easy formatting (e.g. bold text and emphasis) is harder than I thought. > I saw there were discussion about the styling text and the role of the > theme class, using TextStyle but that part is not really documented. > > So far, the easiest way to solve my problem seems to be to use Morphic > to display the contents as I want it, and then include my widget in my > spec application. > > Do you have any suggestions about how to do that? I think that styling > the UI widgets is an important part of the application development, but > it is really hard to find documentation about this. > > Thanks, have a nice day! > Tommaso > > >
