Creating Boxes

hbox,vbox :: [DisplayHandle] -> DisplayHandle

create a horisontal or vertical tiling box. In the horisontal case, the elements in the list will be tiled left-to-right, in the vertical case, from top to bottom. The hbox and vbox wraps the components up in a single box, both returning a DisplayHandle. This handle can then be used to change the size of the box, a size that will be distributed between the box' components depending on their geometric requirements.

phbox,pvbox :: Geometry -> [DisplayHandle] -> DisplayHandle

create horisontal and vertical flowing layouts/tiling parboxes. For a phbox, the box will arrange its components into a set of rows of the width allocated to it. Within each row, the components are resized according to the same rules as for hbox and vbox. The Geometry argument specify the spacing between the rows (for phbox) and columns (for pvbox) and maybe the desired length for the rows/columns (see See section Geometric requirements for definition of Geometry type):

phbox:
  geo = Space ghint       => ghint specifies the inter-row spacing
  geo = Geo ghintx ghinty => ghintx the geometric requirements for a row,
                             ghinty the inter-row spacing.

pvbox:
  geo = Space ghint       => ghint is the inter-column spacing
  geo = Geo ghintx ghinty => ghintx is the geometric hint for the columns,
                             ghinty the inter-column spacing. 

mkHBox,mkVBox :: [DisplayHandle] -> Component (Box, DisplayHandle)

creates components identical to the ones returned by hbox and vbox, but also returns a Box handle to dynamically change the content of a Box.

mkPHBox,mkPVBox :: Geometry -> [DisplayHandle] -> Component (Box, DisplayHandle)

creates horisontal and vertical parboxes like phbox and pvbox, but returns in addition a Box handle.

mkBox :: BoxType -> [DisplayHandle] -> Component (Box,DisplayHandle)

general creator function, where the type of box is encoded in the BoxType algebraic type.