TeSSH

Hmm, looks like I got my conditional compilation statement for this backwards. Thanks for letting me know. And I'll check the label alignment. That particular dialog is using a Frame within a Frame and that sometimes causes the labels to misalign because Delphi tries to store the "overridden" label positions instead of just keeping the defaults. So sometimes I have to manually edit the frame to remove the overrides that it adds.

Should be fixed in v2.35. I didn't find any problem with the font alignment in my testing, so let me know if the labels are still misaligned. If they are, please check other areas to see if any other screens have the same problem or not.

The missing Edit button is correct. The Edit button in CMUD opens the Shared Package Library, which doesn't exist in TeSSH. So that's normal. Not sure about the font issue. Do any other screen show font alignment problems (like the Auto Login tab for the character, or any of the Setting Editor or Preferences screens)? Also, go into your Windows Appearance properties tab and let me know what your default font is set to. For XP the default is Tahoma 8pt, so let me know if it is different from that.

OK, thanks for the screen shots. Looks like I'm going to need to do more Windows XP testing. This is exactly the bug in the DevExpress Label component that they were supposed to have fixed months ago. I don't know why it started happening again (I haven't updated their components since they fixed it). I hate this kind of bug...it drives me crazy! I don't know why a Developer that has been in business for over a decade can't make a simple Label component that remains properly right-aligned when the font for the form is changed. The font in the Delphi designer is Segio UI (the default for Vista), so when CMUD loads the form on your Windows system, it is changing the font to Tahoma, and the stupid labels don't understand how to stay right-aligned. It really pisses me off. But thanks for reporting it.

Are they "autosize" labels or fixed width labels? I've always had trouble with right aligning labels that are "autosized" so I ususally turn it over to fixed width, but that brings up other problems if your font/caption is too big, then it gets messed up as well... can't win!

Yes, they are autosized. And yes, that's the problem. DevExpress wants me to use fixed-width labels, but a) that isn't the default, so it's hard to remember to change it when making a new form, and b) it will make the problems with large font sizes even worse, which is something I want to improve in the future. It's just annoying that autosize would work fine for left-aligned, but not right-aligned labels. Just an indication of how few developers use right-aligned labels anymore.

Well, I had to look pretty hard initially to see what was wrong. I wouldn't worry too much about everything lining up properly: it's hardly going to stop anyone using CMUD. Better support for large fonts would be nice though.

I still haven't had time to fix most of these issues, so they are all still present in the 2.36 version too. At least I got around to making a temporary TeSSH icon though.

OK, when I was looking at various bugs today, I tracked down the problem with the label right alignment. It was really bugging me. I couldn't get this to fail on Vista, even when I set my default system font to Tahoma 8pt. But it failed on an actual XP machine. And then I learned why... All of the forms in CMUD have their default font set to "Segeo UI 9pt" because the forms were designed on my Vista system and that was my system default font at the time. Even though CMUD changes the font to whatever your system default is when you run it, the problem is that when you load CMUD on WinXP, it can't find the "Segeo UI" font, so when it changes the font to the Tahoma system font, it doesn't know the proper size of the font that the form was designed with because it doesn't exist on the system. Windows replaces it with some other font by default (Arial maybe?) which has different sizes. Bah. I wish Microsoft would just add the Vista fonts to their XP Windows Update and get it done with. It's just silly to have different default fonts on different versions of Windows. Driving developers like me crazy. So to fix this I need to go through *all* of the forms in CMUD and override the font to something that exists on all versions of Windows (like Tahoma) instead of letting it use my Vista defaults. Annoying.

You mean instead of it using what your system default was at the time? I don't suppose there is a way of getting it to look at what your system default font is now (either locally or globally across all forms)? And automagically updating everything? No, probably just a pipe dream. [8)]

Nope ;) And yeah, Delphi was setting the form font to whatever the default was when I created the form. In the case of several forms, I had set the font to Segeo UI 9pt so that I could ensure that there was enough space for various labels. It was those forms that were causing the problem. What I did was to change everything to "Tahoma 9pt". That way I can still look for labels that don't have enough space with the larger font, and yet retain a font that exists on both Vista and XP. This seems to have solved the problem. But if you find any labels in 2.37 that I missed, let me know.

Is 9pt what we get when we set Large Fonts in Windows instead of normal fonts which are 8pt? (I saw you mentioned Tahoma 8pt before.) Hmm, no, since large fonts are 25% bigger which would be 10pt if one started at 8pt...

Correct...Large Fonts are still larger. You can't really design a form that looks good at both 8pt and 10pt. For Large Fonts you need to scale all of the form elements (and the form itself). That's what makes designing for Large Fonts so difficult. It's not just scaling everything, but making sure that everything scales in the correct proportions. When you have a mix of panels that are right-aligned, left-aligned, client-stretched, etc, it gets complicated. Delphi does have a form scaling routine, and there are methods to detect the DPI and scale the form before it is displayed. It's just low on my priority list.

Btw, the label alignment should have been fixed in the CMUD 3.03 beta version, so those changes will show up for TeSSH in the 3.04 version that should be out within a couple of weeks. If you discover any label alignment issues in the current 3.03 beta of CMUD/Pro, please let me know.