Enhancing Dialog Appearance with DLGSRV32

We have investiged this problem:

• With Windows 95 only the system fonts are correctly scaled to the different screen resolutions. The system fonts available to be applied in a Dialog Manager font resource definition are "SYSTEM_FONT", "ANSI_FIXED_FONT" and "ANSI_VAR_FONT". Their sizes are determined automatically by the operating system and cannot be specified in a Dialog Manager font resource definition.

• If a non-system font is used, such as "Courier New,10", a TrueType font, the Dialog Manager font scaling algorithm obviously fails to calculate the font dimensions correctly so that a dialog will not display correctly in all possible screen resolutions.

• The effect is that if you use "Courier New,10" as reference font as well as for displaying edittext contents and button labels under Windows 95, you will notice the effect that the edittext contents will not be displayed completely and the button labels will be displayed with a line break.

• If you try to overcome this effect by choosing a larger font as reference font, you will notice even more strange effects regarding edittext contents where you either have a lot of white space in the edittext or the contents will not be displayed completely, as in the example above.

• This limitation does not apply for Windows NT 4, which seems to use a different font scaling algorithm internally.

1. Do always use system fonts. We recommend to choose "ANSI_FIXED_FONT" as reference font and "ANSI_VAR_FONT" as display font. If you prefer a non-proportional font in your edittexts and listboxes and perhaps for statictext headlines, you should use "ANSI_FIXED_FONT".

2. In order to display the edittext contents completely, you should add 2 width units to the number of characters you want to display. For example, if you want to display 10 characters in an edittext, its width should be set to 12. If this overhead is too high for a specific dialog design, you can disable the edittext border by setting .borderwidth to -1. This reduces the overhead to 1 width unit, in the example above, the edittext width should be set to 11 in this case.

3. For buttons, chechboxes and statictexts, you should use "ANSI_VAR_FONT" which will display correctly if no width is specified. Otherwise, the automatically calculated width may be too low and the button labels would be displayed with a line break. In such a case, you should explicitely specify the object's width.

   font RefFont {
       ...
       1: "ANSI_FIXED_FONT";
       ...
   }
   font FixedFont {
       ...
       1: "ANSI_FIXED_FONT";
       ...
   }
   font PropFont {
       ...
       1: "ANSI_VAR_FONT";
       ...
   }
   ...
   default checkbox
   {
     ...
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default edittext
   {
     ...
     .font FixedFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default listbox
   {
     ...
     .font FixedFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default poptext
   {
     ...
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default groupbox
   {
     ...
     .reffont RefFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default pushbutton
   {
     ...
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default radiobutton
   {
     ...
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default statictext
   {
     ...
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default tablefield
   {
     ...
     .reffont RefFont;
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster true;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }
   ...
   default window
   {
     ...
     .reffont RefFont;
     .font PropFont;
     .posraster false;
     .sizeraster true;
     ...
   }