add menu-background vanishes

[J. Landman Gay]

SimPLsol at aol.com wrote:
> Rich Lague asks,
> Does the menu builder move the existing objects down further when there are 
> more cards in the stack?
> 
> Rich,
> Yes, yes, yes!

I believe you, but I haven't ever seen it. Is there a recipe? It should 
be in Bugzilla if so -- that's pretty non-standard behavior.

> Revolution doesn't have a real background, so background groups are added to 
> new cards. The menus are a background group.
> If you add a menu to a single card stack, it will get replicated with each 
> new card. Works fine.
> If you add a menu to some card in a multi-card stack (number of cards does 
> not matter, yours was 500, could have been 1,000 - or just 2) only that card has 
> the menu. Cards made after that card will have the menu. BUT on OS X entering 
> or leaving the range of cards with the menu will resize the height of the 
> stack - usually 20 pixels, but sometimes 40 or 60 or??? sometimes plus sometimes  
>  minus.
> You could copy the menu to each card in the stack.

This isn't a good idea. That would give the stack 500 copies of the same 
group, each independent of the others, and would bloat stack size. 
Instead, use "place grp 'myMenuGrp' onto this card", which shares the 
same group among all the cards.

> Don't add the menu group to the regular background group - trust me, much 
> misery.

What happens? Just curious, I've never tried it.

> The best thing, in my experience the only truly reliable thing, is to reduce 
> you stack to a single card, add the menus, rebuild the stack.

I've never had to do that (and it would really set me back time-wise if 
I did.) I use the "pushdown" handler posted on my web site, which has 
always worked pretty well for me:

<http://hyperactivesw.com/mctutorial/rrcreateMenus.html>


> I wish this was documented - at least, part of Jeanne's excellent conference 
> on menus.
> This has been messing up new users for at least two years, it is time 
> SOMETHING is done about it!

People have been complaining about it for even longer than that. ;) But 
personally I haven't had any trouble with it. Once I understood the menu 
paradigm it made sense.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com