Re: Scrolling menus in MetaCard ? Is it possible ?

Steve Pothier (starnet!apple!aries.saic.com!pothiers)
Fri, 18 Mar 94 07:16:42 MST

>
> In Macintosh system 7, menus will scroll when the mouse hits the bottom
> (or top) of the screen in a long pop-up menu. MetaCard knows whether to
> pop up menus above or below the button, depending on the available space,
> but long menus disappear off the bottom (or top) of the screen.
>
> My pop-up menus are constructed using stacks with a list of buttons. Is
> there any way I can produce long scrolling menus a la Macintosh ? Alan H.

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
either, nor can I find any reference to it in the Open Look or
MS-Windows specs.

Your choices:
1) use a dialog box (my recommendation).
2) break your long menu up into several smaller ones
3) use cascading (pull right) menus
4) create your menu to have multiple columns of buttons (yes, it's
possible)
5) get a bigger screen (if you're running less than 1024x768 resolution,
do yourself a favor and upgrade ;-)
6) use a smaller font for the menu buttons
7) use a "combo box" hack (as in Name field of the Object Font dialog)

> Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE (hewat@ill.fr) Fax (France=33).76.48.39.06

I have also used a scrolling "list behavior" field for that purpose.

-Pothier-