Stack Menu Mystery - Disappointing Documentation (Long, sorry)

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks Richard, I rather suspected what you say might be true. I do however think the documentation of this feature is a bit of disgrace - really I could have dismissed the whole idea after one reading if the description was more complete and had better examples.

Actually I was seeking a way to do something very modest (to me) but which I can’t find a way of doing with a conventional menu item, which is either to choose my own font, or to add a small image to the text of an item - this is because (I believe) that the font Microsoft uses for Windows 7 menu items has quite a restricted character set. I was hoping to introduce the pi symbol (Greek lower case pi) into the text of a menu item, but this only seems to work on the Mac. This is all done with LC7, so Unicode ought to apply, not Mac-Roman… I am getting some help from RunRev on this, but I haven’t cracked it yet.

Thanks again

Graham

> On 22 Nov 2014, at 16:33, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> 
> Graham Samuel wrote:
> > I’ve been using LC for a long time but I’ve never used a stack menu. ...
> > I don’t know how I can use this to make the stack menu ‘look like a
> > standard menu’
> 
> You can't.
> 
> Stack menus were originally the only way to make menus in MetaCard, fine for when it only ran under Motif in Unix but quickly became both tiresome to create and often with an appearance that didn't match other HIGs.
> 
> Dr. Raney remedied the issue in the mid-90s by create the menu subclass of buttons, so we now have pulldowns, popups, and other common menu types that more closely match user expectations on supported platforms.
> 
> On OS X, the contents of menu buttons are rendered using OS routines so they look and behave like standard menus.  I hope to see the same on Ubuntu once we get Themes.
> 
> Now that we have the menu subclass for buttons, the only time using stacks as menus are useful today is for non-textual menus, like popup galleries, color pickers, etc.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Gaskin
> Fourth World Systems
> Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
> 
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