The Fixed widget is a container which can place child widgets at fixed
positions and with fixed sizes, given in pixels. Fixed performs no
automatic layout management.
For most applications, you should not use this container! It keeps you
from having to learn about the other Gtk+ containers, but it results in
broken applications. With Fixed, the following things will result in
truncated text, overlapping widgets, and other display bugs:
- Themes, which may change widget sizes.
- Fonts other than the one you used to write the app will of course
change the size of widgets containing text; keep in mind that users may use
a larger font because of difficulty reading the default, or they may be
using Windows or the framebuffer port of Gtk+, where different fonts are
available.
- Translation of text into other languages changes its size. Also,
display of non-English text will use a different font in many cases.
In addition, the fixed widget can't properly be mirrored in right-to-left
languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. i.e. normally Gtk+ will flip the
interface to put labels to the right of the thing they label, but it can't
do that with Fixed. So your application will not be usable in
right-to-left languages.
Finally, fixed positioning makes it kind of annoying to add/remove GUI
elements, since you have to reposition all the other elements. This is a
long-term maintenance problem for your application.
If you know none of these things are an issue for your application, and
prefer the simplicity of Fixed, by all means use the widget. But you
should be aware of the tradeoffs.
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Sets whether the Fixed widget is created with a separate DrawWindow for
its window or not. (By default, it will be created with no separate
DrawWindow). This function must be called while the Fixed is not
realized, for instance, immediately after the window is created.
This function was added to provide an easy migration path for older
applications which may expect Fixed to have a separate window.
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