In my custom control I avoid WM_ERASEBKGND to get rid of flicker. In WM_PAINT handler I first calculate the exact background region and fill it independently. Then I draw text fields with DrawText but when using DT_EXPANDTABS it seems that tab characters (i.e. 0x09) are skipped and not painted and in the end I get visual garbage between words.
Do I have to process tabs manually or is there a flag or setting to force fill the tabs background?
Related
I am new to win32 programming and have a very naive question.
Say there is my application window of size 1920x1280 and I create a child window over it of size 1920x2560 (double of vertical screen size). Now I load an image onto this child window which has the same size as that of child window i.e 1920x2560.
Now my question is If I use ScrollWindow for vertical scroll, will I necessarily need to repaint the dirty rect (the bottom part), since the image would be already loaded? Is it not possible to avoid that and just move the screen buffers ? Or is there any other way possible to avoid redrawing, may be using bitmaps or something?
An application draws in a window when scrolling, changing, or
selecting a portion of the displayed
data
but you could only draw the differences in the Update Region.
It's also noted that disabling the default handling for the WM_ERASEBKGND message makes smooth.
The disadvantage of your idea is always drawing outside of client area and how to just move the screen buffers to avoid redrawing?
Say you have a form that you can expand to the left to show additional controls:
Collapsed:
Expanded:
The simplest way to achieve this in Delphi is to use alRight as the primary anchor for all controls (instead of alLeft) and then simply adjust the width and X coordinate of the form. Either you can set the Width and Left properties individually, or you can use a function that sets them simultaneously, like
if FCollapsed then
SetWindowPos(Handle, 0, Left - Width, Top, 2 * Width, Height, 0)
else
SetWindowPos(Handle, 0, Left + Width div 2, Top, Width div 2, Height, 0)
The problem is that there is quite noticeable flickering in the always-visible part of the form (in this example, the buttons) while expanding or collapsing. Try it yourself!
It is possible for the operating system to resize the form to the left without any flickering at all -- just grab the left edge of the form using the mouse and drag the mouse to the left or right -- but I am unable to find any function in the Windows API that exposes this kind of resizing.
I have tried to use several different Windows API functions to resize and reposition the form, tried their various parameters (for instance, the SWP_* flags), tried LockWindowUpdate, WM_SETREDRAW, TForm.DoubleBuffered etc. to no avail. I also examined the possibility to use the WM_SYSCOMMAND SC_SIZE approach.
I am not yet sure if the problem lies at the OS level or the VCL level.
Any suggestions?
Edit: I am very surprised to see that this Q received close votes. Let me try to clarify:
Create a new VCL forms application.
Add a few buttons to the right side of the main form and a memo to the left. Set Anchors to [alTop, alRight] on all controls. On the OnClick handler of the buttons, add the following code:
if FCollapsed then
SetWindowPos(Handle, 0, Left - Width, Top, 2 * Width, Height, 0)
else
SetWindowPos(Handle, 0, Left + Width div 2, Top, Width div 2, Height, 0);
FCollapsed := not FCollapsed;
where FCollapsed is private boolean field of the form (initialized to false).
Now, click the buttons repeatedly. (Or give one of them keyboard focus and hold the Enter key for a few seconds.) You will probably notice that the region with the buttons on your monitor will not display a perfect still image, but will flicker. In addition, you might actually see 'ghosts' of the buttons to the left of the actual column of buttons.
I am unable to capture this millisecond flickering using screen capture, so instead I used a digital camera to record my screen:
https://privat.rejbrand.se/VCLFormExpandFlicker.mp4
In this video clip, it is apparent that the column of buttons isn't a static image on the screen; instead, for a few milliseconds each time the form is resized, this region is something else than it should be. It is equally apparent that there is a 'ghost' column of buttons to the left.
My question is if there is any reasonably simple way to get rid of these visual artefacts (that at least to me are very visible even if you expand/collapse the form a single time).
On my Windows 10/Delphi 10.1 computer at work, the form is resized in a perfect manner when I drag its left-most edge using the mouse: the unaffected client area of the form is perfectly static on the monitor. However, on my Windows 7/Delphi 2009 PC at home, I do see that there is a lot of repositioning going on when I do this.
I can provide some insight about why you see ghost images of the other half of your UI and possibly a way to stop it. The ghost image indicates that someone is copying your client area pixels (and copying them to the wrong place, always flush-left in your window) before you have a chance to redraw them with the correct pixels.
There are likely two different, overlapping sources of these ghost pixels.
The first layer applies to all Windows OSes and comes from a BitBlt inside SetWindowPos. You can get rid of that BitBlt in several ways. You can create your own custom implementation of WM_NCCALCSIZE to tell Windows to blit nothing (or to blit one pixel on top of itself), or alternately you can intercept WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING (first passing it onto DefWindowProc) and set WINDOWPOS.flags |= SWP_NOCOPYBITS, which disables the BitBlt inside the internal call to SetWindowPos() that Windows makes during window resizing. This has the same eventual effect of skipping the BitBlt.
However, Windows 8/10 aero adds another, more troublesome layer. Apps now draw into an offscreen buffer which is then composited by the new, evil DWM.exe window manager. And it turns out DWM.exe will sometimes do its own BitBlt type operation on top of the one already done by the legacy XP/Vista/7 code. And stopping DWM from doing its blit is much harder; so far I have not seen any complete solutions.
For sample code that will break through the XP/Vista/7 layer and at least improve the performance of the 8/10 layer, please see:
How to smooth ugly jitter/flicker/jumping when resizing windows, especially dragging left/top border (Win 7-10; bg, bitblt and DWM)?
Since you have multiple child windows, the situation is even a little more complicated. The BitBlt type operations I mentioned above happen on your whole top-level window as a whole (they treat the window as one set of pixels regardless of how many windows are underneath, and regardless of CLIPCHILDREN). But you need to have windows move atomically so that on the next redraw they are all positioned correctly. You may find BeginDeferWindowPos/DeferWindowPos/EndDeferWindowPos useful for that (but only go there if the above tricks do not work).
I'm trying to build a segmented control much like the Bold/Italic/Underline control in TextEdit.
Is there a way to set a custom attributed string for each segment? [set attributedStringValue:] on the cell had no effect (there's no way to set per segment anyway).
If I have to resort to custom drawing, how can I reproduce the inset/blue highlight in the selected state?
Example:
I think these are all icons you need to pre-create and set in the segmented control. Custom drawing would be another option, but I think simply using 3 icons (plus their hires variants) is more flexible.
For custom drawing you'd use an NSAttributedString where you set font and color. Draw it twice, once in white with one pixel vertical offset and and once in blue/black.
I'm have some data output text boxes (text boxes with no border and with the same background as the rest of the window) that I'm trying to align with a standard edit control + spin button, to represent a column of numbers, one of which can be edited:
I can manually align these in the Delphi / C++Builder form designer, but when I then view the form on a different version of Windows or at a different DPI, the text is no longer right-justified, presumably because of differences in the spin button spacing, borders, etc.
I can use EM_GETMARGINS to determine the width of the spin button, but how can I determine the size of the edit control's margins and borders? I've tried various combinations of EM_POSFROMCHAR, ClientToScreen, GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXBORDER), GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXEDGE), and GetThemeMargins, but so far, I can't find a combination that works and makes sense.
More details:
Environment is Delphi / C++Builder XE2.
The data output controls are TEdits with BorderStyle bsNone.
The edit + spin button is a TJvSpinEdit. From viewing its source, it uses EM_SETMARGINS to allow space for its spin button.
Use the Win32 API GetWindowRect() and GetClientRect() methods. The bordering will be the difference between the two rectangles. That will only give you the bordering, though. There could be extra spacing inside the client area.
I am implementing a border control in win32, and I have implemented various styles for that border. I am using simple MoveTo() and LineTo() commands for drawing the border.
My problem is, when i select some new style for my border, it starts painting over the currently drawn border. I understand i need to refresh/repaint my window inorder to have a fresh canvas. I am using InvalidateRect() for now to achieve this purpose. But I am concerned, If i have other windows associated with my border control window (as child windows), how will this effect the child windows?i will need to repaint everything on this window, correct?
Secondly, Is there anyway I can draw lines inside a GDI Region (HRGN)? So far, all i have come across is how to fill up that HRGN with some fill color. Is there anyway i can retrieve HDC associated with that particular HRGN object??
This is not a concern, anything you draw is automatically clipped by the child window rectangles. No extra code is required. The underlying window style flag is WS_CLIPCHILDREN.
You cannot draw lines in a region nor are they associated with a device context. Other than by drawing the region and then drawing the lines in your paint message handler. You are probably interested in paths. The MSDN docs start here.