minetest-flow/doc/manual-positioning.md

Manual positioning

Dynamic element types

This is only recommended for elements inside gui.Container (see below) outside of some rare use cases that need it, as it does not support flow's layouting elements.

If you want to generate element types from a variable, you can use {type = "label", label = "Hello world!"} instead of gui.Label{label="Hello world!"}. HBoxes and VBoxes can be created this way as well (with type = "hbox" and type = "vbox"), however other layouting elements (such as ScrollableVBox and Spacer) won't work correctly.

An example of this is in example.lua.

Manual positioning of elements

You can use gui.Container elements to contain manually positioned elements.

gui.VBox{
    gui.Label{label = "Automatically positioned"},
    gui.Container{
        -- You can specify a width and height if you don't want flow to try and
        -- guess at the size of the container.
        -- w = 3, h = 2,

        -- You may embed most formspec_ast elements inside gui.Container
        {type = "box", x = 0, y = 0, w = 1, h = 1, color = "red"},
        {type = "box", x = 0.3, y = 0.3, w = 1, h = 1, color = "green"},
        {type = "box", x = 0.6, y = 0.6, w = 1, h = 1, color = "blue"},

        {type = "label", x = 2, y = 1.1, label = "Manually positioned"}
    },
}

Note that you should not nest layouted elements (like gui.VBox) inside gui.Container.