Experimental Physics and
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James, On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 10:01 AM, Jameson Graef Rollins <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 28 2018, Pete Jemian <[email protected]> wrote: As
Pete and Andrew have pointed out, MEDM also has a lot NOT going for
it. These anti-features include "not supported" and "uses antiquated X
library that is itself poorly supported". We see real problems with
MEDM and modern X servers. More obviously, MEDM requires X11, which has
long been a significant and painful requirement for folks using Windows
and/or MacOS, and is a non-starter for people wanting to use Android or
iOS. No one else has mentioned this, but MEDM has always been simply horrible in handling fonts. It uses custom X11 font names that require modifying the X11 font table. I am not aware of any other software in regular use that makes such a poor choice. A display manager like MEDM is fundamentally a graphical display program. Most of the objects it displays being text. MEDM gets one of the most basic components of displaying text (ie, fonts) absolutely wrong. It is not the cases that the choice made ~25 years ago was OK, and is now out-of-date: custom fonts for X11 were a horrible choice 25 years ago too. MEDM has always done fonts wrong and anyone unfortunate enough to be using MEDM is stuck with this problem and very poor fonts to this day. MEDM
is OK for dynamically generating screens. It includes a quirky but
impressive home-built GUI generator. Qt Designer is far better. It may have a slight
learning curve for someone familiar only with MEDM, but it very good and
has many more features and is well-supported and widely used in other
contexts. In short, there is nothing about MEDM that is not greatly improved by caQtDM.
The
adl2ui translator is very good. We have translated more than 1500 adl
files to ui file and really use these (for the past couple years). The
only recurring translation problems have been a)
groupings in MEDM do not translate well, and can leave unresponsive
areas of the screen. Ungrouping the adl files fixes this. b) the space used by text boxes in MEDM is not enforced, probably related to its font handling being broken by design. There is nothing to recommend MEDM. --Matt Newville
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ANJ, 01 Mar 2018 |
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