BlackBox 0.70 style patches
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BlackBox 0.70 style patches

These patches are deprecated. Do not use.

Blackbox 0.70 is currently under development. This version features quite a bit of reworking compared to 0.65.0. The style code has also been slightly redone, but I think there are still some improvements needed.

Therefore I have started producing patches that implement these various ideas, and I'm submitting them to the Blackbox developers for approval. Right here you can see screenshots that illustrate "before and after patching" behaviour for each patch. The patches are hosted on the Blackbox SF tracker, there are links below. I also describe what I intend to do in brief. Please read on.

The main goal

The 0.65 style "engine" has some issues. Perhaps the one that has been bugging me (and perhaps other Blackbox style creators as well) is the fact that many style directives are not implemented deep enough i.e. they are applied at top level and are inherited by all the interface elements with the same values.

Some work has been done in 0.70 to increase granularity and flexibility. The first example for this were the border directives, which have taken borders definition to the acme of flexibility by allowing all interface elements (buttons, labels, windows, menus) to have their own private definition of the borders.

My main goal is to extend this flexibility to other directives as well. I would also like to provide additional functionality and maybe even a little pure eye-candy in the form of configurable titlebar layouts and font shadows (normal, shadow, extrude and emboss).

Proposed patches

[#896864] 0.70cvs: Closer window bevel

SourceForge tracker link
Usually, with the bevel = 0, the window buttons still get a 1 pixel border around them. This patch will eliminate that and leave the bevel exactly what it's supposed to be. For bevel = 0 the buttons will be stuck right next to the window border and label. This brings possibilities for nicer styles and IMO makes more sense as far as the bevel is concerned.

[#896867] 0.70cvs: Higher window label

SourceForge tracker link
The old behaviour is to make the window label as high as the text in it plus 2 more pixels (one above the text, one below). The problem is that when the label is sunken or raised those pixels are taken up by the shadows and the text ends up stuck right against the edge of the label. This patch simply add 4 pixels instead of 2, so even with shadows there is still a 1 pixel space between the font and the edge.

[#896870] 0.70cvs: Pressed buttons different colors for focus/unfocus

SourceForge tracker link
This patch replaces the style option "window.button.pressed" with "window.button.pressed.focus" and "window.button.pressed.unfocus". The intention is to allow different colors for pressed buttons depending on the kind of window (focused or not focused) they are on. The patch doesn't affect picColor (although that should probably be taken into consideration as well).