>> In Macintosh system 7, menus will scroll when the mouse hits the bottom
>> (or top) of the screen in a long pop-up menu.
>This seems to be a Macintosh-only feature. There is no way to do this
>in MetaCard. There is no support for this in the Xt/Motif toolkit
Thats what I feared. But it is a nice feature of Mac system 7. Menu items
disappearing off the top or bottom of the screen are nothing that Motif
nor MS-Windows can be proud of.
>1) use a dialog box (my recommendation).
I want to show the user all the available choices, not ask him to type
something into a dialog. I can of course put all the choices in a field and
return the choice that is clicked on, but this must surely break Motif
guidelines, and besides, it doesn't look nice ;-)
>2) break your long menu up into several smaller ones
That's what I think I will do.
>3) use cascading (pull right) menus
I need to do that in another case, but haven't found how it works
(because I haven't really tried yet).
>4) create your menu to have multiple columns of buttons (yes, it's
> possible)
Interesting. It might look OK, but I've never seen a menu like that.
>5) get a bigger screen (if you're running less than 1024x768 resolution,
> do yourself a favor and upgrade ;-)
Hey, I'm talking about 1280 x 1024 screens. Even my Mac has 1152x870 ;-)
Even if the total length of the menu fits the screen, there are some cases
(selection of items at either end) that cause the other end to go off screen.
eg if the application window is near the top of the screen and the user selects
an item from the bottom of the menu. Then if the user wants next to select
an item from the top of the list, the list should move down to reveal the top.
>6) use a smaller font for the menu buttons
Yes, I'll have to do that too, but I'm getting too old for the tiny fonts that
some Motif applications use to try to get around such problems.
>7) use a "combo box" hack (as in Name field of the Object Font dialog)
I'll have to look that up.
Many thanks for a lot of interesting suggestions. At least, now I can choose
one and not waste my time trying to do the impossible.
Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE (hewat@ill.fr) Fax (France=33).76.48.39.06