[Qgis-community-team] conventions

[Tara Athan]

After looking at Otto's revision, I think I have not been clear about 
which macros apply to which  GUI items.

\button  - I was thinking of this one to be used when the button has no 
icon, just text. Save As Default is a button that appears in the Layer 
Properties dialog. So to reproduce the appearance of the version 0.10 
GUI, it would have text inside a box with slightly rounded corners, with 
a shadow to indicate it is clickable. The fill is a gray gradient - I 
don't know if this is reproducible in latex.

\toolbtn - I was thinking of this one for the icons that appear in the 
toolbars. Per earlier e-mail, this should perhaps have 2 required 
arguments, the icon and the label (tooltip). The icon would have the 
shadow, since it is the clickable part, and the tooltip could have a 
yellow fill. For this to work, we need to have all the GUI icons present 
in the image folders. In a very quick check, I could not find, for 
example, the print icon, unless it appears under another name.

\toolbox - This was intended for GRASS tools. In skimming through the 
toolbox, I see that many tools are indicated by multiple icons, such as 
the conversion tools. So perhaps this macro requires multiple versions 
to accommodate different numbers of icons. The whole line is clickable, 
so it would have a shadowbox around all the icons and label.

\menuopt - There are two kinds of menu options - the first level has no 
icons (like File), the second level sometimes has icons  (like New 
Project). Do we need a second menuopt macro (menuopt2 ?) that also 
requires the icon? I am inclined to NOT include the shortcuts in the 
macro, even though they appear in the GUI. We can leave it to the 
writers choice whether to mention the shortcut, using the keystroke macros.

On a more general note, I am thinking that the appearance we should try 
to reproduce is the non-hover version, because if a new user is scanning 
the GUI for something that looks like what they see in the manual, it 
would be misleading to show an appearance that would only match if they 
were hovering on the right item already.  So I am thinking for a menu 
option, such as File, we could have a shadowbox with gray fill and no 
outline.

I haven't made any of these changes yet - please let me know what you 
think. Also, it would be helpful to know if the appearance will be 
dramatically different in the version 1.0 GUI (Tim?)

Tara

PS I haven't been able to figure out the syntax for \shadowsize - does 
anyone have experience with the fancybox package to know how this works?