Thanks for the exhaustive replies everyone. I am pretty familiar with coordinate systems etc but I was testing a few things the other night and the layout engine had me baffled. For whatever reason I thought that the global origin was in the centre of the screen. I asked the question out of frustration.
Also, it took me a little while to figure out that there is a scaling transformation happening which maps layout coordinate system to the screen coordinate system. I started working with an existing layout which was set to something like 320 x 240. This layout space is then mapped to my 1920x1200 monitor space. It took me a while to get the size of my various elements to appear as I wanted.
Also, one stupid mistake I made was trying to position right-aligned text. The text rectangle was being positioned correctly but the content appeared in the wrong place. Well, duh...
To make things more difficult for myself I am working on a black and white layout with a black background. I ended up creating a bunch of white placeholder images to finally figure out the layout coordinate system and the scaling transformation. By the way, this site (
http://dummyimage.com/) is really handy for generating dummy images which are really useful for planning layouts.
All this gave me an idea for a little layout editor which could be used to design top level layouts. It would be a graphical editor which would spit out some sort of Attractmode Markup Language (AML) file which could be saved and reloaded into the editor. Once the layout is ready for testing one would "compile" the .aml file into .nut and voila!
Right now my workflow revolves around Sublime Text Editor on OS X. I have created a basic build system for AM and when I'm done tweaking the nut file I just press the build button and Sublime fires AM to show me layout. It's pretty convenient.
Anyway... back to work before someone notices that I'm obsessing over the "wrong" thing (oh, how little my boss knows of what's truly important in life ;-)
cheers,
-tomek