Re: [libreoffice-design] Re: Resizability of the dialogs

Hi Adolfo,

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos píše v Út 09. 12. 2014 v 10:26 -0600:

> I have also seen a report
> (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86891) in which a user
> had the LibreOffice file picking dialog appearing too wide, could not
> resize it, and I had never made that one non-resizable (my only
> modification to that one dialog was making it modal, Jay’s
> suggestion).

Interesting - can you please ask him / her for the profile, and try to
track down what exactly is the change that makes it non-resizable?

> I don’t think re-enabling resizing would be “the” fix for that.
> Granted, it could be seen by some users as a regression, but the truth
> is that many of those dialogs had resizability by mistake (it’s a
> Glade default) but it just contributed to LibreOffice looking
> unfinished: resizing, in most of the cases, did not help to actually
> see more content, it just made the window uglier.

That's true - OTOH the dialogs that do not resize correctly (or resize
in an ugly way) should be fixed anyway, because just showing them in a
different language (that has a different length of descriptions) can
cause the same trouble as the plain resizing.

But the concept of 'seeing more content' you mentioned is a good
guideline here I think; actually I have noticed it also here:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/hig/2002-December/msg00035.html

----- 8< -----
Problem: Dialog windows and message windows can be resized larger 
(minimum size is normal size) even though no additional information is 
visible when the window is resized.
Recommended Fix: A dialog window should be resizable only if more 
information is visible when the window is resized. A message window 
should not be resizable.
----- 8< -----

The thing is how to define the 'additional information'.  Eg. in the
Hyperlink dialog, only trivial links can be seen fully in the "Target:"
edit field, anything longer is cut off - so there, resizing definitely
makes sense, as that provides additional information.

In general, the dialogs with edit boxes that have no limit on the number
of characters should be resizable, as it is really annoying to see just
part of the information, and have to move in the edit box.

> So far, the “problematic” dialogs have been those of recent .ui
> conversion, aren’t they? I am aware of the problem appearing sometimes
> in the Hyperlink and fpicker dialogs, right? Are you aware of others?

I think Jay had some examples; and Miguel Angel just wrote some examples
too.

> A correct fix would be to find the thing in the old profiles that’s
> botching the dialog size, and remove it on migration. Perhaps Caolán,
> if he finds a little time, could help. If it proves too
> time-consuming, then you can re-enable resizing, although that should
> be a last-resort method.

Well - the thing is that Caolan is an extremely busy developer; asking
him for fixing this really does not scale ;-)  I could have a look
myself, but knowing the migration code, it will take me several hours of
hacking code that is extremely hard to test (the profile is always
migrated once; there are as many profiles as users out there), and that
has large consequences if a bug appears there.

OTOH re-enabling resizing is a matter of minutes...

Any chance you can make it to the Design hangout today, at least for a
while?  Would be good to talk this in a call I believe :-)

In the meantime, I'll re-enable it for the Hyperlink dialog, and the
dialogs that Miguel Angel mentioned - hope that's OK?

All the best,
Kendy


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