PML Customisation
User Guide
Form Layout : Gadget Boxes, Containers and Grid Co-ordinates
Every gadget has a placement point at its top left-hand corner, and a width and height, which together define a notional gadget box.
Frame gadgets are special, because they are also containers for holding other gadgets A Frame has two regions, a title bar, which displays its tag text, and a client area that contains its gadgets (the clients). In most respects, the Form acts as a frame, but there are some minor differences, which are explained it the text.
The client area has a notional grid with an origin (0.0, 0.0) near its top left-hand corner. It has a small padding space border, so that its gadget's do not generally touch the bounding box.
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The grid horizontal pitch is the notional character width for the system font. (Historical Note: This font is now always variably spaced, so n horizontal grid units no longer equate to n characters. Generally, it is more than n unless the string has a high proportion of wide characters e.g. capitals, numerals, w's, m's etc. It is important that you understand this concept when you specify gadget sizes.)
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The grid vertical pitch is the line-height, which is the height of the tallest of the textual single-line gadgets: TOGGLE, BUTTON, OPTION, TEXT or single-line PARAGRAPH. (Historical Note: The Form's AUTOALIGN attribute causes these gadgets to be (roughly) centre-aligned for Path Right, but this is no longer recommended as it interferes with auto-placement. See NOALIGN and current defaults setting for the layout modes.).
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Figure 17:2.
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The extremities of a gadget box (gadget limits) are referred to as XMIN.gadget, YMIN.gadget, XMAX.gadget and YMAX.gadget.
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Figure 17:3.
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