fxruby users - Nov 2008 - FXFont bug

It seemed to be impossible to assign a font object to a widget''s font 
attribute outside the initialize method. When I did so, Ruby crashed like 
this:

E:\Ruby Programs\Demo>FontBug
E:/Ruby Programs/Demo/FontBug.rb:33: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24) [i386-mswin32]

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual 
way.
Please contact the application''s support team for more information.

By trial and error I think I have figured out that if you assign a font to a 
widget outside the parent''s initialize method, you have to call create
on it
first.

Where is the best documentation that explains under what conditions you must 
call create? Is it a good idea to just call create under all circumstances? 
The FXRuby book says in Chapter 11, "You would first construct the new 
FXFont object, and if necessary, call create() on it." But I can''t
find when
"if necessary" is. FXRI does not even mention a create method for
FXFont.

Is this a known bug? (I consider it a bug for Ruby to seg fault no matter 
how wrong my code is. And my code is often very, very wrong.)

On Nov 15, 2008, at 6:01 AM, William Blum wrote:
> By trial and error I think I have figured out that if you assign a  
> font to a
> widget outside the parent''s initialize method, you have to call  
> create on it
> first.
>
> Where is the best documentation that explains under what conditions  
> you must
> call create?
This topic is discussed in depth in section 7.7 of the FXRuby book  
("Client-Side vs. Server-Side Objects"). It''s also discussed
in this
question from the FOX FAQ:

	http://www.fox-toolkit.org/faq.html#ILLEGALICON

> Is it a good idea to just call create under all circumstances?
Not necessarily; you can''t, for example, call create() on an FXFont  
instance until its parent FXApp has been created. But yes, assuming  
that has already happened, you should probably call create() on the  
font as soon as you construct it, e.g.

	font = FXFont.new(...)
	font.create

Also, calling create() more than once on the same FXFont object is  
harmless; every call to create() after the first one is just a no-op.
> FXRI does not even mention a create method for FXFont.
I don''t have FXRi installed on the computer I''m sitting at
right now,
but it may be the case that it doesn''t show create() as a method on  
the FXFont class since it is actually declared in FXId, the base class  
for FXFont.

Hope this helps,

Lyle