GTK Development Blog

Right-to-left languages

As the first thing in this series, we add back support for right-to-left languages.

It may be a little surprising if you are only used to writing software in English, but GTK+ has traditionally tried to ‘do the right thing’ automatically for languages that are written from right to left like Hebrew. Concretely, that means that we interpret the starting position in horizontal layouts to be on the right in these languages, i.e. we ‘flip’ horizontal arrangements. This can of course be overridden, by setting the ::text-direction property of the container. By default, the text direction gets determined from the locale.

This is of course very easy to do. The code I showed in the first post assumes left-to-right order of the children. We keep it that way and just reorder the children when necessary. Note that the measure() code doesn’t need any change, since it does not depend on the order at all. So, we just change size_allocate():

if (text_direction == rtl) {
  child[0] = last;
  child[1] = center;
  child[2] = first;
} else {
  child[0] = first;
  child[1] = center;
  child[2] = last;
}

One small gotcha that I haven’t mentioned yet: CSS assumes that :first-child is always the leftmost element, regardless of text direction. So, when we are moving child widgets from the left side to the right side in RTL context, we need to reorder the corresponding CSS nodes when the text direction changes.

if (direction == GTK_TEXT_DIR_LTR) {
  first = gtk_widget_get_css_node (start_widget);
  last = gtk_widget_get_css_node (end_widget);
} else {
  first = gtk_widget_get_css_node (end_widget);
  last = gtk_widget_get_css_node (start_widget);
}

parent = gtk_widget_get_css_node (box);
gtk_css_node_insert_after (parent, first, NULL);
gtk_css_node_insert_before (parent, last, NULL);

Natural size

Since this was easy, we’ll press on and make our size allocation respect natural size too.

In GTK+ every widget has not just a minimum size, which is the smallest size that it can usefully present itself in, but also a preferred or natural size. The measure() function returns both of these sizes.

For natural size, we can do slightly better than the code we showed last time. Back then, we simply calculated the natural size of the box by adding up the natural sizes of all children. But we want to center the middle child, so lets ask for enough room to give all children their natural size and put the middle child in the center:

*natural = child2_nat + 2 * MAX (child1_nat, child3_nat);

The size_allocate() function needs more work, and here we have some decisions to make. With 3 children vying for the available space, and the extra constraint imposed by centering, we could prefer to give more space to the outer children, or make the center child bigger. Since centering is the defining feature of this widget, I went with the latter choice.

So, how much space can we give to the center widget ? We don’t want to make it smaller than the minimum size, or bigger than the natural size, and we need to leave at least the minimum required space for the outer children.

center_size = CLAMP (width - (left_min + right_min),
                     center_min, center_nat);

Next, lets figure out how much space we can give to the outer children. We obviously can’t hand out more than we have left after giving the center child its part, and we have to split the remaining space evenly in order for centering to work (which is what avail in the code below is about). Again, want to respect the childs minimum and natural size.

avail = MIN ( (width - center_size) / 2,
              width - (center_size + right_min));
left_size = CLAMP (avail, left_min, left_nat);

And similarly for the right child. After determining the child sizes, all that is left is to assign the positions in the same way we’ve seen in part one: put the outer children at the very left and right, then center the middle child and push it to the right or left to avoid overlap.

References

1. Container secrets, size allocation
2. The code with these changes

I recently had an opportunity to reimplement size allocation for a container with all the things that GTK+ supports:

• RTL support
• Natural size
• Align and expand
• Height-for-width
• Orientation support
• Baselines

If you do a one-off container in an application, most of these may not matter, but in a general-purpose GTK+ widget, all of them are likely to become relevant sooner or later.

Since this is quite a lot of ground to cover, it will take a few posts to get through this. Lets get started!

The starting point

GtkCenterBox is a simple widget that can contain three child widgets – it is not a GtkContainer, at least not currently. In GTK+ 4, any widget can be a parent of other widgets. The layout that GtkCenterBox applies to its children is to center the middle child, as long as that is possible.  This is functionality that GtkBox provides in GTK+ 3, but the center child handling complicates an already complex container. Therefore we are moving it into a separate widget in GTK+ 4.

When I started looking at the GtkCenterBox size allocation code, it was very simple. The two methods to look at are measure() and size_allocate().

The measure implementation was just measuring the three children, adding up the minimum and natural sizes in horizontal direction, and taking their maximum in vertical direction. In rough pseudo-code:

if (orientation == GTK_ORIENTATION_HORIZONTAL) {
  *minimum = child1_min + child2_min + child3_min;
  *natural = child1_nat + child2_nat + child3_nat;
} else {
  *minimum = MAX(child1_min, child2_min, child3_min);
  *natural = MAX(child1_min, child2_min, child3_min);
}

The size_allocate implementation was putting the first child to the left, the last child to the right, and then placed the middle child in the center, eliminating overlaps by pushing it to the right or left, as needed.

child1_width = child1_min;
child2_width = child2_min;
child3_width = child3_min;
child1_x = 0;
child3_x = total_width - child3_width;
child2_x = total_width/2 - child2_width/2;
if (child2_x < child1_x + child1_width)
  child2_2 = child1_x + child1_width;
else if (child2_x + child2_width > child3_x)
  child2_x = child3_x - child2_width;

As you can see, this is pretty straightforward. Sadly, it does not have any of the features I listed above:

• Children always get their minimum size
• The ::expand property is not taken into account
• The first child is always placed at the left, regardless of text direction
• No vertical orientation
• No height-for-width support
• Baselines are ignored

Over the next few posts, I’ll try to show how to add these features back, hopefully clarifying some of the mysteries of how GTK+ size allocation works, along the way.

References

1. First commit in the series
2. Documentation for GtkWidget size allocation
3. The code that we start from