1.11 Paddings

Some containers allow your views to have paddings set. When the view is placed inside the container, additional space will be reserved around the view for the paddings; that space will be left intentionally blank.

The container will initially call the methods

-autoLayoutDefaultLeftPadding
-autoLayoutDefaultRightPadding
-autoLayoutDefaultBottomPadding
-autoLayoutDefaultTopPadding

of the view to get its default padding on the various sides.

You can later change the paddings manually by calling the appropriate method of the container, such as -setLeftPadding:forView: for boxes.

Renaissance AutoLayout adds a category to NSView, implementing the following methods:

• - (float) autoLayoutDefaultLeftPadding, which should return the default padding on the left side for that view.
• - (float) autoLayoutDefaultRightPadding, which should return the default padding on the right side for that view.
• - (float) autoLayoutDefaultBottomPadding, which should return the default padding on the bottom side for that view.
• - (float) autoLayoutDefaultTopPadding, which should return the default padding on the top side for that view.

The default implementation of those methods in NSView returns 4 for all of them. Containers and spaces have implementations of those methods returning 0 for all of them.

Unless you are looking for special effects (or for trouble), you generally don't need to modify paddings.