cocoaforge

Right. Gotcha, but it wasn't me who said that. Personally, I really don't see the point of it, is the terminal really needed at all when it comes to the creation of message styles? But that's just me. Not sure who you refer to when you say "you guys", the Tick, but I never felt "talked down to". Ah well, whatever, eh?

We aren't just directly speaking to you though, kunai, but generally. I was referencing df0notfound's comment and the tutorial in general. Tick's "you guys" was (likely) in reference to those who feel as df0notfound do that the tutorial is filled with information they already know. If you felt it was adequate then this precludes you.

Fair enough, let's leave it at that, then. (:

[add] Okay, this is driving me nuts. (Actual shot), why does it add extra padding? I've been redoing the css and suchlike several times now, and everything works just fine at last, 'cept for that part. I can't get rid of that padding. Even though all the classes that wrap the messages have been set to 0 margin and at most 10px padding, it still adds that extra padding. I've tried most everything I can think of now. Why does it do this?

And while on the subject, does it import a standard css file or something? If not, how come the incoming and outgoing font-sizes are different? I never specified that.

If the Actual Shot is from Adium, and you don't have 'ignore incoming fonts' set, then the different fonts could be coming from what you / whoever you're talking to have set as your fonts.

For tutorial-ness... I was thinking it might make more sense to have something wiki-style, categories of common problems / things you'd want to do. When I'm hacking something and looking for information, I agree with df0notfound's comment - I don't want to wade through a full-fledged tutorial, I want to find some examples and solutions to common problems. Then again, it might be too much.

Why not provide a nice mix of both? This is an approach found in Apple documentation with in-depth programming guides that go over everything and API references that give details for specific entries with fast access. Each avenue gets the consumer what they want - information on what they are searching for.

Either way I think we could start by replicating what's needed from Perez's old howto onto the trac wiki.

bgannin wrote:And in all fairness, not everyone is familiar with Terminal so they might such a level of hand-holding. Assumptions make for problems usually, at least in my experience.

If the terminal was even remotely relevant to creating a theme then I would be all for it. I'm afraid its not though, its only relevant to the theme author because they use a terminal based text editor which a novice certainly should not be using.
If users want to know about vi and the terminal I'm sure there are many sources for that information elsewhere on the internet.

Perez wrote:If the Actual Shot is from Adium, and you don't have 'ignore incoming fonts' set, then the different fonts could be coming from what you / whoever you're talking to have set as your fonts.

Yeah, the actual shot, as opposed to a mockup shot, is shot in Adium. And thanks, I had unticked the 'show received message fonts' and then thought nothing of it, but I had forgotten about the 'text display' option just above it. The incoming and outgoing fonts look just the same now. Just the evil padding left now, then.

Perez wrote:For tutorial-ness... I was thinking it might make more sense to have something wiki-style, categories of common problems / things you'd want to do. When I'm hacking something and looking for information, I agree with df0notfound's comment - I don't want to wade through a full-fledged tutorial, I want to find some examples and solutions to common problems. Then again, it might be too much.

Yeah, I agree.

[add] Geh. I give up. No matter what I try, the padding will only increase, but never decrease. I've spent too much time on this as it is already, so for now I'll just have to give it a rest. If someone wants to have a look at the main.css and tell me if they see something I do not, something that gives a 40-50+ padding, go right on ahead.

Could you post a zip of the whole style? It's hard to be sure what's going on without the rest of the code. (For example, there might be something in the HTML that the CSS isn't catching, creating a big space.) Also, are you sure it's padding, and not a margin? (Padding = inside, margin = outside. I frequently put borders on my elements so I can see where they really are, since sometimes they're not really doing what I think I'm telling them to do.)

Yeah, sure. Excuse the mess, though, and thanks for offering to help. (:

I'm pretty sure it's not the margin, I put borders around stuff frequently, too. Then again, I'm not sure I did it on all the elements this time..

Well, I think it was/is an Adium Weirdness™ bug. After playing with div and span properties, and noticing that text copied from Safari had no extra whitespace and text copied from Adium did, I took all the tabs and newlines out of the HTML, and it seems to work fine (zip of tinkered-with version).

I feel like I remember this coming up before... you might also want to play around with spans v. divs. For example, in my textonly I have tabs/newlines in my HTML, but no extra space shows up in Adium / copy-pasting.

Hm, you're right about the whitespace.. Interesting. I've tried exchanging the divs for spans and so already, but it didn't seem to make things better, so I figured it wouldn't help. I guess I'll tinker s'more.

But are you sure that's the right file though ? It seems pretty much the same as the one I uploaded.. At least, it has just as much extra space..?

As seen in Adium X 0.89.1 (and it was similar in SVN, I'm just not at my usual computer at the moment):


(Did you quit/reopen Adium and all that?)

Ooh. Nevermind. It loaded the old one 'cause it was still in the message style folder. My bad. So yeah, it works fine now.
Though, why is the header off in your screenshot, did you do that yourself or does it just not load?

But the question remains, why can't my message style be structured without adding whitespace whereas others can?

I had the header off (from another view - I forgot to turn it on).

And... I don't know.

Oh, okay then.

Ah, well, no matter. Thanks for all the help, though. :3