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[DanRRight]

Is it possible to reproduce this kind of LV sheet with the features mentioned below? It has to include more then 100 (may be 1000) lines. Am i correct that the icons in Clearwin LV are marked with the single alphabet letters so only 26 images and hence only 26 lines are basically possible? The whole table data or just small pieces of it (like just the text highlights) have to be externally updatable, say, every second or so.I think window_update@ will handle that if just handful of individual cells will be updates, but if the whole table has to be updated every second, i guess, this will suck a lot of processing power. Anyway, you've definitely seen this kind of sheets before and know what's important there.

[LitusSaxonicum]

Dan,

I wouldn't even begin to attempt this with LV. Frankly, I'd just open a big graphics area and update it every time a cell changed. It could have scroll bars. It looks like it is output only - a significantly easier job than input AND output.

Eddie

[Robert]

I would agree with Eddie there - it is much easier drawing onto an area yourself.

[LitusSaxonicum]

Robert,

Thanks for confirming my thoughts.

What Dan has in his image is full of text, but really, it is a big graphic. Graphics you can always control down to the individual pixel, but ordinary windows (with a caption bar etc) are laid out in units of an average width character - and this is not simply a foible of ClearWin+, it is central to Windows. In a graphic (i.e. in a %gr area), you have absolute command of colour for foreground and background, you can update as much or as little as you like, as frequently as you like. You can permit user interaction, or forbid it (i.e. the graphic can be "read-only" or "read-write" - "read-only" being from the user perspective, from the programmer perspective it is "write-only").

If a big graphic doesn't have a pivot (%pv) it won't be resizable either, so further simplifying writing to it. You can fake the vertical scrolling by re-writing the screen with a different range of lines of text visible, or you can draw to a bigger graphic (I'm not sure about Dan's 1000 lines, as that would require maybe 10,000 pixels high!) and do real scrolling. ClearWin is packed full of graphics calls to do the requisite actions.

If you want to permit editing the values in the cells, you have to capture keypresses, like we used to before windows and clearwin. I had hoped that such horrible business was in my past!

Early versions of Excel and Quattro don't allow you to edit in the cells of a spreadsheet, you have a "data entry" box - it's still there, although you can now edit directly on the sheet too. This is probably because the main spreadsheet area is a graphic. (Guess on my part).

Eddie

[DanRRight]

Yea, that what's basically i was doing - making text and graphics output on graphics window. The whole thing though looks ugly and not professional. You will never show this to anyone. This basically means we are returning 25 years back, and forgetting all the new tools appeared during this time.

Ideally, such spreadsheets have to be created in Fortran with just your mouse. You'd even have not have to program anything by hands - with such complex structure this, i can imagine, would be the whole hell. But in visual approach you'd use mouse to add everything, color the rows and columns, move them if needed with just minimal use of keyboard and programming. The graphics programming approach must create you almost complete Fortran prototype which you need to fill with your data and may be further adjust details in the source code. Kind of like in some imaginable, ideal, truly Visual Fortran. Or truly Visual Clearwin

[PaulLaidler]

Visual ClearWin does exist for .NET but there is a learning curve to follow and you need to use Visual Studio.

You will find a set of sample programs in the standard installation.

On my Vista machine they are located in C:\Users\Paul\Documents\FTN95 Examples\NET\Visual ClearwinVB.

You can do a lot of visual stuff this way but probably not as much as you need here.

[DanRRight]

I afraid to take different path at compiler installation (the one with VStudio) due to possible potential mess or incompatibilities.

I expected to have exe files pre-compiled in Visual Clearwin demo directory but there were no one to look at and decide if it is what i really want. Can this be done at least for demo purposes? Typically, everyone makes demo executables or presentation files...

[PaulLaidler]

As I recall you do not need Visual Studio to run the demo. The exe is created by running the bat file.

[DanRRight]

That's the good news, i thought it needs MS VS or VB. Well, being curious why DEMO requires more then zero, maximum one click I've tried it again, third time in three years and
after several thousands of clicks failed.

Alas, definitely i do something wrong since nothing works besides older standard FTN95 examples (checkmate, clearwin and opengl) which i know well. In NET directory where Visual Clearwin is, compiles and works only Threads and ExceptionGeneration.

What i have:

1) I have standard FTN95 installation without VS
2)i do not have VB either
3) i have NET 2 or later installed
4) I've run mk95 and created DEMO95.EXE
5) running DEMO95 gives me nothing at all, the program blinks with several printed on screen numbers and disappears
6) do not find other bat files in both Visual Clearwin folders

Additionally, looks like DEMO95 is not a "demo" at all, it just checks if compiler works after installation.

What's to do next then? Well, trying to compile by the wild guess, say, the ftn95 file in "S0 Blank" directory

>ftn95 Main.f95 /link

It gives the error
*** The MODULE VC was compiled in CLR mode but you are attempting to USE it in x86 mode. Recompile the module with /-CLR specified.

I do not see module VC so meantime trying other stupid ideas like adding switch /-clr to the main code in the hope that this will recompile the VC module too

>ftn95 Main.f95 /link /-clr

Nope, it gives another error

"*** The option /CLR is only available in /CLR mode"

Going circles. Wrong idea.

Then searching for module VC... OK, found it in FTN95/include, thinking how to recompile ins file...
.......
.......
.......
Feel myself like an early bird, the beta-tester of new software I could not believe myself of what i am doing - i am trying to look at DEMO of compiler capabilities. Do i also need to search for manual for that?

Trying to save your time, Paul, for more important compiler development, let me ask everyone here if they have succeeded to see Visual Clearwin visually not virtually and how they proceeded to achieve that. Searching this forum, I've just found a single one person who was asking question about Visual Clearwin.

All this shocks me. Clearwin is amazing product, and Visual Clearwin by common sense must be even better, a new higher level of simplicity. It has to be the product for mass fortran programmers , everyone must adopt it like wildfire. But what i see - i am the only who is interested, and even i have not seen it yet after a half a dozen years after it appeared

[PaulLaidler]

My apologies. I was confusing this with something else.
You will need Visual Studio to run the demos.
You will certainly need Visual Studio in order to create your own dialogs visually.

The only reason for leaving out the exes was to reduce the size of the download.

[DanRRight]

OK, will install someday VS and look at VC. Even without looking on it, i will speculate from general point of view that this is the way how all GUIs have to be created. But it depends how it was implemented. One question still remains: how to launch all that separate demos in the folders, there are no EXEs, no BATs, and the compilation is not obvious ?
By the way, if you have not seen, the Winteracter has nice very appealing demo.

As to saving on download size....well, even if you pay for the traffic, i am sure 25 small size EXEs will not change the total size considerably. But this will increase users base by noticeable factors. Users just do not know Visual Clearwin. Probably 1:1000 users seen it so far. Plus the FTN95 executables are smallest and most compact exes in the world .

[PaulLaidler]

OK I will see if we can include these exes in the next release.

[LitusSaxonicum]

I can’t help but disagree with Dan’s view that doing the main part of a program’s output entirely in graphics mode display is necessarily ugly or “not professional”. The example he posted looked pretty good to me - and if it wasn't programmed by him, it could be emulated without too much difficulty. (Hint: use an onscreen ruler like "Ruler by George!" to measure row heights, cell widths, line thicknesses etc, import a screen grab into Paint to sample the RGB colour values).

I had a look at most of the commercial applications I use, including MS Office, Corel DRAW, etc and they all seem to use a big resizeable graphics area to transact most of their business. (One or two primitive applications like Calculator don’t, but they don’t look any better to me).

The best rule I know is "less is more".

I suppose Dan is asking for a spreadsheet like Excel with a finite number of rows and columns generated by a single format code (%n.mxl ?). I could use that ! When is it coming in ClearWin?

Eddie

PS: It does make me wonder if "user defined" format codes are possible. I suspect not.

[PaulLaidler]

A listview in report form is the nearest you can get to a spread sheet at the moment. It does have grid lines and you can move from one cell to another, editing as you go.

Having user defined format codes blows the mind.