[mythtv] Ticket #8783: Themes - MythCenter-wide, improvement

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 13:25 -0500, Kevin Kuphal wrote:

> I've mostly made changes to the non-wide version since it's the one I
> run.  Is there a desire to keep these two in sync or are we just
> running with what looks best for each independently?  I haven't
> updated my Myth for a while but could do so if there was interest in
> tidying up the non-wide theme prior to the release.   Some things
> (like the text not being readable in the Schedule Recordings buttons)
> need to be addressed but I'm not sure reading the commit logs if they
> have been.

I use the non-wide MythCenter myself on one frontend. As a starting
point it really was in a much better state when I started looking
at the themes. And in fact I looked at it for fixing some of the
problems in MythCenter-wide. The only thing I think should really
be synchronized are the font types and the addition of the clock
(though if you can think of a better location...) Right now the 
non-wide version of MythCenter relies of Microsoft fonts, but these
can't be made dependencies in Myth disto's because the package for
those fonts actually downloads them from the Microsoft website due to
licensing restrictions. So most people end up using MythCenter with
some random font selected by the OS. But just changing the font is
not enough. A lot of the layout unfortunately depends on the font
metrics. For example the centered text in some places is actually
left and top aligned but simply placed in the center; the right thing
to do is to make the bounding box of the text fit inside the button
and then use <align>center</align>

The font sizes, the number of items on a screen, spacing are all things
that probably have to differ a bit. I'm assuming a 38" or better 16:9
screen @ 1280x720 or better 10 ft from the viewer. For 4:3 you probably
need to assume a 20" screen at about 580x430 @ 10ft, incidentally that
describes my 4:3 setup. The decisions need to be a bit different to
maintain readability.

FYI The patch on #8188 does include MythCenter non-wide changes,
I didn't look at them to see if they made sense, but you might want
to look at them.

There are also some problems specific to MythCenter non-wide.
For example, if you use the Qt painter you will notice the scroll
arrows on some screens don't change properly when you reach the top
or bottom of a list. This is because the arrows are placed outside
the parent widget, so they are outside the clipping area. OpenGL
doesn't show such artifacts, but that's probably because it doesn't
do clipping yet. This lack of clipping is probably the reason some
people see 45% "idle" CPU usage with the more active themes.. so
this problem will become apparent with the OpenGL painter when we
get around to implementing clipping in it.

-- Daniel