Skinning a button and using bitmap fonts

[xtal256]

Why not? its just one simple Stylesheet syntax line... (setting the background image)

Not really. I want have buttons of different sizes, which means the button itself needs to resize. And to do this with images means you need to break the image up into 9 segments - the corners, sides, and centre. I am not sure what this technique is called, but it is quite commonly used.
Now that i think about it, it may be possible to do with CSS. This sort of stuff is done in Firefox to customise it's UI.

For buttons, why do you even bother with fonts?
You usually don't have that many buttons, so making an image (with the text) per button is probably far quicker than investing the trouble of doing it with fonts.

Ya reccon? Consider that i may have between 20 and 50 buttons in total throughout my GUI, obviously each with different text. Then imagine i decide to change the wording of some text slightly, or translate the application.

Have you seen Qt3D?
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt3d-snapsho...-painting.html

No, and it looks interesting. It may not help me much for skinning, but i am still going to use OpenGL for rendering the actual game (in 2D), so it will be useful for that.

thanks

[high_flyer]

Ya reccon? Consider that i may have between 20 and 50 buttons in total throughout my GUI, obviously each with different text. Then imagine i decide to change the wording of some text slightly, or translate the application.

Since I know nothing about your game, it was merely a guess.
Usually there are not that many buttons.
However even 50 for 50 buttons I think its would be easier to specify images (you could sperate background from text images for example and combine them).
Its true that when you want to change the text you will have to edit an image, but how often and in what number this happens?
But, its your project I just offered ONE (simple) way of doing it.
Resizing the buttons is more of an argument for me.
But with Qt Stylesheets even that is not such a problem, you can define a 'Border image' which does the 9 part devision for you. (and if your provide a large enough text image it could just scale with the button.

[xtal256]

I suppose i should have mentioned the size/scope of the game. Some simple games might just have a few buttons ("Start", "Quit", etc). But no matter how many buttons i have, i just hate having to create an image for each one. It's not what good programmers do .

Maybe i will not use bitmap fonts after all. I could still get the GUI looking quite good with regular fonts.

And I will try the border image you speak of. I knew there was something like that in CSS because i had seen it in some Firefox themes. If all goes well, i should be able to skin the whole GUI entirely using CSS. I know it should be possible using CSS, i just don't know how much of it Qt supports.