Absolute positioning
The programmer specifies the position and the size of each widget in pixels. When you use absolute positioning, we have to understand the following limitations:
- The size and the position of a widget do not change if we resize a window
- Applications might look different on various platforms
- Changing fonts in our application might spoil the layout
- If we decide to change our layout, we must completely redo our layout, which is tedious and time consuming
The following example will position widgets in absolute coordinates.
#!/usr/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- """ ZetCode PyQt4 tutorial This example shows three labels on a window using absolute positioning. author: Jan Bodnar website: zetcode.com last edited: October 2011 """ import sys from PyQt4 import QtGui class Example(QtGui.QWidget): def __init__(self): super(Example, self).__init__() self.initUI() def initUI(self): lbl1 = QtGui.QLabel('ZetCode', self) lbl1.move(15, 10) lbl2 = QtGui.QLabel('tutorials', self) lbl2.move(35, 40) lbl3 = QtGui.QLabel('for programmers', self) lbl3.move(55, 70) self.setGeometry(300, 300, 250, 150) self.setWindowTitle('Absolute') self.show() def main(): app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv) ex = Example() sys.exit(app.exec_()) if __name__ == '__main__': main()
We use the move()
method to position our widgets. In our case these are labels. We position them by providing the x and y coordinates. The beginning of the coordinate system is at the left top corner. The x values grow from left to right. The y values grow from top to bottom.
lbl1 = QtGui.QLabel('Zetcode', self) lbl1.move(15, 10)
The label widget is positioned at x=15
and y=10
.
Figure: Absolute positioning