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@node Part II Introduction
@chapter Introduction
This part of the documentation describes the Form Designer, a GUI
builder meant to help you interactively design dialogue forms for use
with the Forms Library. This part assumes the reader is familiar with
the Forms Library and has read Part I of this document. Even though
designing forms is quite easy and requires only a relatively small
number of lines of C-code, it can be time consuming to figure out all
required positions and sizes of the objects. The Form Designer was
written to facilitate the construction of forms. With Form Designer,
there is no longer any need to calculate or guess where the objects
should be. The highly interactive and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What
You Get) nature of the Form Designer relieves the application
programmer from the time consuming process of user interface
construction so that he/she can concentrate more on what the
application program intends to accomplish. Form Designer provides the
abilities to interactively place, move and scale objects on a form,
also the abilities to set all attributes of an object. Once
satisfactory forms are constructed, the Form Designer generates a
piece of C-code that can then be included in the application program.
This piece of code will contain one procedure create_form_xxx() for
each form, where xxx indicates the form name. The application only
needs to call it to generate the form designed. The code produced is
easily readable. The Form Designer also lets the user identify each
object with C variables for later reference in the application program
and allows advanced object callback bindings all within the Form
Designer. All actions are performed with the mouse or the function
keys. It uses a large number of forms itself to let the user make
choices, set attributes, etc. Most of these forms were designed using
the Form Designer itself. It is important to note that the Form
Designer only helps you in designing the layout of your forms. It does
not allow you to specify the actions that have to be taken when, e.g.,
a button is pushed. You can indicate the callback routine to call but
the application program has to supply this callback routine. Also, the
current version is mostly a layout tool and not a programming
environment, not yet anyway. This means that the Form Designer does
not allow you to initialize all your objects. You can, however,
initialize some objects, e.g., you can set the bounds of a slider
inside the Form Designer. Eventually full support of object
initialization will be implemented.
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