86 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
86 lines
4.0 KiB
Plaintext
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** General UI Guidelines for KiCad Development
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Capitalization:
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For any visible text used within KiCad, follow recommendations here:
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http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/design-text-labels.html.en
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in the "Capitalization" section. This applies to all Menus, Titles,
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Labels, Tooltips, Buttons, etc.
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The capitalization for the application names is KiCad, Eeschema, CvPcb,
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GerbView, and Pcbnew. All strings that have application names that are
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visible to the user should be capitalized this way. It's also a good
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idea use this capitalization in source code comments as well to prevent
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confusion of new contributors.
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Dialogs:
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Follow the recommendations here:
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http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/design-window.html.en
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paying particular attention to "initial focus", "sensible default values",
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"default buttons", ESC key termination. Please note that the escape key
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termination only works properly if there is a dialog button defined with
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an ID of wxID_CANCEL or SetEscapeID( MY_ESCAPE_BUTTON_ID ) is called during
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dialog initialization. The former is the preferred method for handling
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escape key dialog termination. There is a checkbox in wxformbuilder for
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the "default" control, and this is the one fired when the "enter" key
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is pressed.
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Use wxWidgets "sizers" in all dialogs, no matter how simple they are:
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http://zetcode.com/tutorials/wxwidgetstutorial/layoutmanagement
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and keep dialogs resizeable.
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Configure the sizers so that as the dialog window is expanded, the most
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sensible use of the increased dialog window occurs automatically by the
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sizers. For example, in the DRC dialog of Pcbnew, sizers should be used to
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expand the text control to use the full available free window area, so that
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the user's view of the items in the text control is maximized as he/she
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expands the dialog window, making it easier to read more DRC error messages.
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In other dialogs without one component more important than the others, the
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sizers might be configured to position the controls to sensible positions
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near the perimeter of the increasingly larger dialog box, not necessarily
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leaving them all bundled tightly together. The dialog box should look
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nice at any size large enough to show all the components.
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When using wxFormBuilder, please add the following settings to the
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"Dialog" node:
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subclass.name <- DIALOG_SHIM
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subclass.header <- dialog_shim.h
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This will provide for an override of the Show( bool ) wxWindow() function
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and provide retentitive size and position for the session.
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Use tooltips to explain the functionality of each non-obvious control.
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This is important because the help files and the wiki often lag behind
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the source code.
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Avoid defining initial dialog sizes if possible. Let the sizers do their
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job. After the dialog is fit to the sizers, set the minimum size to the
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current size to prevent the dialog controls from being obscured when
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resizing the dialog. If the labels or text of the dialog controls are,
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set or changed at run time. Rerun wxWindow::Fit() to allow the dialog to
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re-size and adjust for the new control widths. This can all be done after
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the dialog is created but before it is shown or use class methods to
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re-size the dialog as required. Reset the minimum size to the updated
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dialog size.
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Dialog windows shall not exceed 1024 x 768 when displayed in a 13 point font.
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Note that the font used by end users is not something that you control from
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within the dialog, but for testing purposes please do not exceed this dialog
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size should the user have selected a font size of 13 points.
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Quoting:
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Filenames, paths or other text should be with single quotes ''. e.g.:
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'filename.kicad_pcb'
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'longpath/subdir'
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'FOOTPRINTNAME'
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'anything else'
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Often text strings like this end up in panels which use HTML rendering, and this
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can happen in the future. Previously used angle brackets only cause grief there.
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