I was wanting to shrink the font of elements of the SOFA GUI dialogs so I could squeeze more in or relocate items to more logical positions. Can’t be that hard, surely? I have since discovered that if a drop-down list (wxPython wx.Choice widget) has lots of items e.g. 30+ it takes seconds for fresh items to be added the the widget if you are trying to use your own font selection (using setFont()) on Linux. SetItems() takes a long time as, presumably, it sets the font for each individual item. And given I can’t control how many items will appear in drop-down lists or avoid having to repopulate lists (e.g. new data table selected so variable lists have to be updated) the option of shrinking fonts is not viable. Back to the drawing board.
[UPDATE] I came up with a workaround. Because there is no performance problem when items are included with the initial instantiation of dropdown widgets, all dropdowns are rebuilt each time they are changed. This means they have to be destroyed before being replaced, and the panel they are on must be hidden temporarily to avoid flicker on Windows, but it works. The fact that I was able to clean up some code in the process almost compensates for the considerable extra work 🙂
