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Help With Button Layout

Norman Davis normandavis at bigfoot.com
Tue Dec 10 00:30:54 EST 2002 
Hi Kenneth,

kennethg at pd.jaring.my (Kenneth Gomez) wrote in message news:<3df3dfaa.7860877 at news.jaring.my>...
> I am creating a simple GUI. However, I am having problems getting my
> buttons to lay side by side. Do you know why my first two buttons are
> spaced out so far.

To get a better look at what's happenning, add borders to your
canvases like this: 

    def createCanvas(self):


        """ Main drawing canvas """
        self.mainCanvas = Canvas(self, relief=RAISED, borderwidth = 2)
        self.mainCanvas.grid(row=2, column = 2,
columnspan=5,sticky=W+E+S+N)

        """ Canvas to hold icons """
        self.iconCanvas = Canvas(self, relief=RAISED, borderwidth = 2)
        self.iconCanvas.grid(row=2, column=0, columnspan =
2,sticky=W+E+N+S)

In a grid, columns (and rows) become as big as necessary to contain
the largest item. The spanning makes this rule a little more complex,
but what you should see with the borders now is that iconCanvas causes
columns 0 and 1 to be stretched out above it. Also, the menu bar
stretches out column 0, so the Mesh button in column 1 is pushed over
(though I didn't expected it to be pushed that far). The five other
buttons fit snugly together above mainCanvas.

I'm guessing you would like the rows to be more independent. The grid
layout manager is good for many things, but I think what you need for
this application is to use the "pack" layout manager. Vertically stack
frames representing rows: one frame for the menu bar, one frame for
the buttons, one frame for the canvases, and one frame for the entry
field.

If you'd like to stay with the grid for now, you could move the
buttons over into their own columns further to the right. Maybe
there's a way to arrange them there that looks nice.

> Also, how do I get my menu, buttons and all to start at the top, left
> hand corner, instead of the center of the canvas?
> 

If you do stay with grid, try removing the line
        self.master.geometry("800x600")
and see if you like that. If you go with pack, you might want to keep
that line if you want a fixed initial window size. pack should give
you enough control to put everything where you want it.

(note: it looks like you've got an extra call to self.grid() at the
bottom of the definition of createButtons.)

Norm.
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