Re: Help menu position

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 17:52, Jim Kingdon wrote:
> > The Unit types, Materials, and Terrain types are then displayed in their
> > own sub-menus (as shown above).
> 
> Something like this sounds about right to me.
> 
> The technical question of how to get a menu to scroll is a valid one,
> but my overall reaction to that question is that the menu shouldn't be
> that long in the first place.  If we really want users to be scrolling
> through a long list, better to have it part of the help dialog box,
> rather than in a menu (which is harder to play with for an extended
> period, because it tends to do things like disappear).
> 
> I'd probably just say have Unit types, Materials, and Terrain do what
> they do now (that is, open the help dialog), rather than try to do
> sub-menus (which would have the same problem, if there were too many
> items in the sub-menu).

My idea was that, should one of those lists not fit on the screen
without scrolling, it could be divided into lists, by alphabetical
order.  It could be made to work much the same way as traditional
printed encyclopedias (one menu for 'A-G', one for 'H-N', one for 'O-U',
and one for 'V-Z').  It would take some extra coding (particularly to
determine the optimal groupings), but it might make for an elegant
solution.