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| Color and font management |
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| <H1> |
| Color and font management</H1> |
| <p align="left">When using forms in a non-trivial way, it is important to share |
| as much as possible to conserve resources. For this reason, color management |
| should be separated from the toolkit when there are more than one form to |
| handle.</p> |
| <p align="left">Of course, it is possible to create one toolkit per form, but |
| that is too wasteful if there are many forms. Instead:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left">Create one toolkit for all the forms that have the same life |
| cycle. For example, if creating a multi-page editor, create one toolkit per |
| editor and dispose it when editor is disposed. All the pages in the editor |
| should share this toolkit.</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left">Create one color manager (<code>FormColors</code>) per |
| plug-in. When creating the toolkit, pass the color manager to the toolkit. |
| The toolkit will know that the colors are shared and will not dispose them.</p> |
| </li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left">Use platform support for fonts and if possible, use <code> |
| JFaceResources</code> predefined fonts. Between default, 'banner' and |
| 'header' fonts, you can accomplish a lot. Using many fonts is very confusing |
| for the user, and if you do manage your own, you must ensure alternatives |
| across platforms. The JFace fonts are guaranteed to work on all the |
| platforms Eclipse ships on.</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left">Dispose the color manager on plug-in shutdown (don't assume |
| that plug-in shutdown also means platform shutdown - Eclipse runtime can |
| uninstall your plug-in dynamically while the platform is still running).</p></li> |
| <li> |
| <p align="left">Use form color manager to allocate all the colors needed by |
| the forms.</p></li> |
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